If humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor, what was that common ancestor?

Question

is that is what they call the missing link? or is the missing link a link which links monkeys to us, meaning we evolved from them...

what i always thought was the latter, but im reading on yahoo that its the former.

what is exacly the theory on this common ancestor? what kind of being could it have been? are you saying x gave birth to some apes, those apes moved to another country adapted and became humans (slowly obviously, first becoming lucy and so forth) and the ones that went else where adapted and simply didnt NEED to become intellegent?

what kind of enviroment would you need to be in for the need to become intellegent to survive?

Answer 1

It isn't known for sure which are our ancestors because there are too few fossils. Sahelanthropus tchadensis may be the common ancestor of humans and chimps.  It is thought by many researchers to be upright and bipedal.  That would make chimps evolved from upright walking hominids.   The genetic data is much more compelling but doesn't give an exact time to the common ancestor.  The common ancestor with all apes might be proconsul.  There would be some ancient even older monkey that would be common ancestor with humans and monkeys.  The more distantly related animal, the farther back you need to go to find the common ancestor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proconsul_a...

Answer 2

You see, when you take anthropology, you get to compare skulls of modern apes and modern man then you see the skulls of those that are our possible ancestors. You then get a sense of how experts came to their thoughts. What Chas is talking about is that there is much assumption in this area but it is very well studied and carefully done. Experts do not use the term "missing link" because there are too many small changes to pin point a missing link and the chances of finding that is very slim. The basic idea is that apes lived in trees but some moved out of that environment. They had to start walking on two legs to survive. Apes have no good defenses like other animals which have sharp teeth, claws, or strength. They had to achieve a defense which was an increase toward human intelligence. This intelligence was slow at first but then started building upon itself to a point that it can be described as human.

Answer 3

A Humape its gotta be

Answer 4

Monkeys have been around so long that they are simply primates like us, part of the order of primates.

Apes as well are not part of our immediate biological tree. What we are close to, very close, is chimpanzees. Genetically we are closer to chimps than African elephants are to Asian elephants.

The fossil "Lucy" found by the Leakeys is very humanoid, except for her height.

Harsh changes in environments force species to adapt or die. When the climate changed enough to turn vast areas of African jungle into savannah, people had to look for food there. They probably ate a lot of carrion, as a high protein diet is essential for brain growth. They adapted their social structure to add more protection to infants, and since they already had a larynx speech began to develop.

Answer 5

every human is a new variation, but here

The evolutionary history of the primates can be traced back for some 85 million years, as one of the oldest of all surviving placental mammal groups. Most paleontologists consider that primates share a common ancestor with the bats,[citation needed] another extremely ancient lineage, and that this ancestor probably lived during the late Cretaceous, together with the last dinosaurs. The oldest known primates come from North America, but they were widespread in Eurasia and Africa as well, during the tropical conditions of the Paleocene and Eocene.

With the beginning of modern climates, marked by the formation of the first Antarctic ice in the early Oligocene around 40 million years ago, primates went extinct everywhere but Africa and southern Asia. One such primate from this time was Notharctus. Fossil evidence found in Germany 20 years ago was determined to be about 16.5 million years old, some 1.5 million years older than similar species from East Africa.[10] It suggests that the primate lineage of the great apes first appeared in Eurasia and not Africa .

The discoveries suggest that the early ancestors of the hominids (the family of great apes and humans) migrated to Eurasia from Africa about 17 million years ago, just before these two continents were cut off from each other by an expansion of the Mediterranean Sea. Begun[10] says that these primates flourished in Eurasia and that their lineage leading to the African apes and humans—Dryopithecus—migrated south from Europe or Western Asia into Africa. The surviving tropical population, which is seen most completely in the upper Eocene and lowermost Oligocene fossil beds of the Fayum depression southwest of Cairo, gave rise to all living primates—lemurs of Madagascar, lorises of Southeast Asia, galagos or "bush babies" of Africa, and the anthropoids; platyrrhines or New World monkeys, and catarrhines or Old World monkeys and the great apes and humans.

The earliest known catarrhine is Kamoyapithecus from uppermost Oligocene at Eragaleit in the northern Kenya rift valley, dated to 24 mya (millions of years before present). Its ancestry is generally thought to be close to such genera as Aegyptopithecus, Propliopithecus, and Parapithecus from the Fayum, at around 35 mya. There are no fossils from the intervening 11 million years. No near ancestor to South American platyrrhines, whose fossil record begins at around 30 mya, can be identified among the North African fossil species, and possibly lies in other forms that lived in West Africa that were caught up in the still-mysterious transatlantic sweepstakes that sent primates, rodents, boa constrictors, and cichlid fishes from Africa to South America sometime in the Oligocene.

In the early Miocene, after 22 mya, many kinds of arboreally adapted primitive catarrhines from East Africa suggest a long history of prior diversification. Because the fossils at 20 mya include fragments attributed to Victoriapithecus, the earliest cercopithecoid; the other forms are (by default) grouped as hominoids, without clear evidence as to which are closest to living apes and humans. Among the presently recognized genera in this group, which ranges up to 13 mya, we find Proconsul, Rangwapithecus, Dendropithecus, Limnopithecus, Nacholapithecus, Equatorius, Nyanzapithecus, Afropithecus, Heliopithecus, and Kenyapithecus, all from East Africa. The presence of other generalized non-cercopithecids of middle Miocene age from sites far distant—Otavipithecus from cave deposits in Namibia, and Pierolapithecus and Dryopithecus from France, Spain and Austria—is evidence of a wide diversity of forms across Africa and the Mediterranean basin during the relatively warm and equable climatic regimes of the early and middle Miocene.

The youngest of the Miocene hominoids, Oreopithecus, is from 9 mya coal beds in Italy.

Molecular evidence indicates that the lineage of gibbons (family Hylobatidae) became distinct between 18 and 12 Ma, and that of orangutans (subfamily Ponginae) at about 12 Ma; we have no fossils that clearly document the ancestry of gibbons, which may have originated in a so far unknown South East Asian hominid population, but fossil proto-orangutans may be represented by Ramapithecus from India and Griphopithecus from Turkey, dated to around 10 Ma.

It has been suggested that species close to last common ancestors of gorillas, chimpanzees and humans may be represented by Nakalipithecus fossils found in Kenya and Ouranopithecus found in Greece. Molecular evidence suggests that between 8 and 4 mya, first the gorillas, and then the chimpanzee (genus Pan) split off from the line leading to the humans; human DNA is 98.4 percent identical to the DNA of chimpanzees.[11] The fossil record of gorillas and chimpanzees is quite limited [12]. Both poor preservation (rain forest soils tend to be acidic and dissolve bone) and sampling bias probably contribute to this problem.

Other Hominines, however, likely adapted (along with antelopes, hyenas, dogs, pigs, elephants, and horses) to the somewhat drier environments outside the equatorial belt (which contracted after about 8 million years ago; reference needed) and their fossils are relatively well known. The earliest are Sahelanthropus tchadensis (7 mya) and Orrorin tugenensis (6 mya), followed by:

Ardipithecus (5.5–4.4 mya), with species Ar. kadabba and Ar. ramidus;

Australopithecus (4–2 mya), with species Au. anamensis, Au. afarensis, Au. africanus, Au. bahrelghazali, and Au. garhi;

Kenyanthropus (3-2.7 mya), with species Kenyanthropus platyops

Paranthropus (3–1.2 mya), with species P. aethiopicus, P. boisei, and P. robustus;

Homo (2 mya–present), with species Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo ergaster, Homo georgicus, Homo antecessor, Homo cepranensis, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo rhodesiensis, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, Homo sapiens idaltu, Archaic Homo sapiens, Homo floresiensis

Answer 6

Some lonely one-celled animal.

Answer 7

The idea that man evolved from an ape is completely false, and is

laughable.

It is not supported by any evidence whatsoever.

All hominid fossils are clearly human or clearly ape.

Evolution requires the creation of new genetic information. The proposed mechanism is mutations, yet all observed mutations are information neutral or lossy. So where did this new information come from? Many people are duped into thinking that adaptation and natural selection (which are observed) is the same thing as evolution. Not so.

Some mechanism is required to explain wehre humans got their extra information from. For those that would have us believe in the 'fact' of evolution, surely a little evidence should be easy to show us doubters ?

History is full of frauds and over-enthusiastic claims of anthropologists

Man was created as man. We are very different to all apes/monkeys and there is no evidence that we evolved at all.

The evidence does not support he idea that we are evolved from an ape. All hominid fossils are clearly human or clearly ape.

History is full of frauds and wishful thinking in regard to alleged missing links:

Piltdown man – fraud

Java man - a few teeth, and a few skull and bone fragments

Nebraska man - a pigs tooth

Australopithecene (Lucy) - portrayed with human like hands and feet despite the fact that it is known to have ape like hands and feet, and to have been a knuckle walker.

To believe we evolved from an ape requires an awful lot of faith! It flies in the face of the evidence, and of scientific knowledge.

http://creationontheweb.com/content/view...