Ok, the humans and apes thing...someone help me...!?

Question

ok, I understand right that humans and apes may have evolved from a common ancestor... BUT i'm just struggling to understand why there are so many kinds of apes and monkeys but only ONE 'type' of human...hope you're getting me so far...if we went through evolution..homo erectus and all that and ended up as homo sapiens, why oh why arent there different kinds of human running around!! what happened to them? why didnt they make it to this point? are we as far developed as human can get..!? surely if theres many types of monkeys etc there must be different types of human...we can't be the only ones to make it this far..what will happen to us now! more branches off the evolution tree?? HELP!

Answer 1

Actually, we are apes, so there is still a lot of apes running around.

Answer 2

many 1000s of years ago ..  there were many different kinds of humans ..   but they all got whipped out by homosapiens  ..   they were the most intelligent of the humans.    their skills and intelligence were FAR more advanced then any other..  over time they others started to die out since they had to compete for food.

Answer 3

Consider this...

The Sumatran volcano from 75,000 years ago, which put the earth into "nuclear winter" for a few years, reduced Homo Sapiens to an estimated 2-10,000 people worldwide...

Additionally, any remaining Homonids would have likely been eliminated during that period. The two exceptions were,  Neanderthals, who survived up until about 24,000 years ago, and perhaps Homo Floriensis (sp?), the little people of Indonesia, who were last seen 13,000 years ago...

The three major pockets of Homo Sapiens that remained were...

1) Those in Africa (Click-speaking Bushmen have had a continuous culture for the past 15,000 years)...

2) Cro-Magnon became Caucasians in Europe...

3) Asians, who developed farming in Eastern Asia...

All three major groups are from the same species, and therefore "cross-mating" yields viable offspring...

Some gorillas one mountain away from another group, have been isloated for so long, that they have different genes which are not compatible with one another anymore, and have become different internally...Homo Sapiens differences are external only!

A recent article claims that Homo Sapiens could split into two species, as soon as one thousand years from now...

Anything is possible, so just relax, you're alive now! Enjoy it...

Answer 4

at one time there were seven species of humans on this planet.  over the years, only the homo sapiens have survived.  it makes me think, with what we know about us, that homo sapiens  wiped out the others in favor of its own race.

Answer 5

Um..I'm having a difficult time here because I don't know how anyone can't see this..

Ethnicities.  There's difference in skull features, skin colour, hair types..just, a lot of variation.  Small in comparison to primate differences, yes..but they're variations nonetheless.

Answer 6

I wouldn't be surprised if we ate them.

Answer 7

Actually, while there are many monkey species there are very few apes. In fact from 15-10 mya apes have been on the decline, dwindling in species. Remember that humans are apes, not monkeys. This means that the adaptations developed in apes (mobility of arms/fingers, intelligence, bipedal stance to name a few), have not been in general as successful as the traits found in cercopithecoids.

Humans are the only example of an ape that has thrived in multiple environments and is not in some present of near future endangerment. While there was radiation of hominins, it has followed that the geographic changes have not favored the vast majority and that homo sapiens really found a great niche and was able to fully exploit it.