If humankind evolved from a shrewish creature, why only this creature evolve?

Question

And why would it evolve into a bent over creature with so much strain onits spine?

Answer 1

Selective evolution, survival of the fittest, we will never know  how this came about but over time anything can happen.

Answer 2

If one critter evolves from another, that doesn't mean the ancestor must become extinct (although this typically happens in a localized area.) When the dinosars died out they left an evolutionary vacuum that mammals, with their advantage of a longer period of nurture & brain growth, were quick to exploit.  The prosimian, with forward facing eyes & ability to eat both insects & plants was well positioned to fill the vacuum.

Hominids (bipedal apes) could see predators, & food, over obstacles due to their increased line of sight. The ability to walk upright allowed them to carry food back to the safety of trees & their young.  The traits that allowed humans to evolve were: 1.) Ability to walk on 2 legs.  2.) Forward facing eyes to allow judging of distance.  3.) Ability to digest both plant & animal food. 4.) The opposed thumb.

Hominids began to scavenge the kills of predators & this extra protien allowed a larger brain. The larger brain led to hominids becoming predators. Because predators must develop a larger brain than their prey (enhanced by higher quality protien) the brain experienced rapid growth.  The discovery of fire & use of such is probably the line that separates hominids & homo lines of our ancestors (open to debate.)

I find it interesting that DNA analysis indicates the chimp & bonobo have evolved further from our common ancestor than humans have.  Evolution has no goal in mind, it is simply an adaptation to conditions.

Edit:

Contrary to what some would have you believe, this little shrew like animal was not the only mammal to exploit the vacuum left by the dinosars.  Others were alive & evolved to produce other mammals.  However the prosimian was the ancestor of primates... monkeys then apes.

Answer 3

ALL lifeforms continuously evolve.  Evolving never stops.  For example, click on this link to see an image of what beavers looked like about 12,000 - 10,000 years years ago.  Some kinds of beaver were 2.5 meters tall (8 - 9 feet tall).  Humans formed organized hunting parties and began to kill the giant beavers.  Gradually, all of the very large predators around the world were fought by humans.  Humans began to be the more dominate species and large predators, like the sabre-tooth tiger, either completely died off or gradually became smaller with each generation as ecosystems changed, mostly the part about humans taking themselves out of the food chain.

http://my.execpc.com/~coken2/exhibita.jp...

To see what humans might evolve into in the future, click on this link.  When this site opens, click on the yellow button at the bottom that says, "Go to the future".  Then, explore several different possibilities:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7348103/

Answer 4

ALL mammals evolved from a shrewlike creature that was found 65 million years ago - humans, giraffes, and dolphins.

What makes you think that this was the only creature to evolve?  All living things are constantly evolving.

Answer 5

other species evolved but owing to natural selection they died out.

Reptilian species survived as well as Mammalian species (the shrew like ancestor is only the ancestor of mammals, dinosaurs are the ancestors of reptiles and birds.).

I hope that answers your question.

Remember evolution is like a tree, sometimes the branches stop progressing, other times they grow and flourish

Answer 6

Give it time, quite a few cool beasties have come and gone and I doubt  evolution has come to a dead halt. I doubt we'll see any changes in our lifetime but who knows?   Someday the President of the USA might be a turkey!

Answer 7

Evolution spends so much time trying to figure out why we stand upright or why we don't have hair ect. but you don't see much of why have we developed complex thought.  Why of all the millions of animals that have come and gone, why did we get a different sort of path to follow.  There must have been some really unique situations and a lot of them to have made us be able to figure math and create art, along with other skills.

Answer 8

Human beings evolved an upright position because they left the tree areas and ventured out onto the grassy plain areas. They needed to be able to stand up to look out for predators. Hence the term Homo Erectus which were the first people.

Standing up does have many advantages and primitive people tended not to carry things the way we do.

They also had a shorter lifespan so that arthritic changes wouldn't have had time to develop to cause them back problems.

They were stronger and didn't sit in front of computers all day either.