Why are apes not evolving now?
"The reason other primates aren't evolving into humans is that they're doing just fine," Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., told Live Science.
That's important to remember when we ask why our ape cousins aren't evolving the traits that characterize humans. Modern great apes live in heavily forested environments where the ability to climb trees is a big bonus — so they have no need for human bipedalism.
In the following pages, we provide answers to this and related questions. Our main point: Chimps are still around today because humans did not evolve from living chimps1 – both humans and chimps evolved from a now extinct common ancestor.
Still Evolving
But all animals on Earth are continuing to evolve, and that means humans are, too.
No species stops evolving. Evolution refers to the relationship between a species and its environment. That relationship continues until the species goes extinct. Some species do not change very much in their evolutionary process if they are well adapted to their environment.
The short answer is no. An individual of one species cannot, during its lifetime, turn into another species.
We have much bigger brains relative to body size and in absolute size than other mammals, and have a level of intelligence that other animals don't. There are many advantages to intelligence, such as the ability to plan and cooperate, innovate new techniques and share information about what works.
Humans diverged from apes—specifically, the chimpanzee lineage—at some point between about 9.3 million and 6.5 million years ago, towards the end of the Miocene epoch.
Monkeys and apes lack the neural control over their vocal tract muscles to properly configure them for speech, Fitch concludes. "If a human brain were in control, they could talk," he says, though it remains a bit of a mystery why other animals can produce at least rudimentary speech.
Did we evolve from monkeys? 5 to 8 million years ago. Shortly thereafter, the species diverged into two separate lineages. One of these lineages ultimately evolved into gorillas and chimps, and the other evolved into early human ancestors called hominids.
Are humans still evolving from monkeys?
How are humans and monkeys related? Humans and monkeys are both primates. But humans are not descended from monkeys or any other primate living today. We do share a common ape ancestor with chimpanzees.
Humans have never stopped evolving and continue to do so today. Evolution is a slow process that takes many generations of reproduction to become evident. Because humans take so long to reproduce, it takes hundreds to thousands of years for changes in humans to become evident.
