• Question: How long did it take us to evolve from monkeys to humans?

    Asked by sevo1223 to Allan, Angela, Diva, Harriet, Nathan on 2 Jul 2012.
    • Photo: Nathan Langford

      Nathan Langford answered on 2 Jul 2012:

      This really quite a difficult question to answer, because monkeys themselves were around for such a long time and were evolving throughout. Evolution is a continuous process, so it’s difficult to say exactly how long things took, because it’s hard to pinpoint an exact start and end time. But we can get some idea. According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_evolution), the primates (which include monkeys and humans) probably first appeared around 80 million years ago. On the other hand, the various types of early humans probably appeared around 2 – 3 million years ago and the first modern humans probably around 200,000 years ago. From these numbers, I think it’s at least safe to say that it took many 10s of millions of years for monkeys to evolve into humans.

    • Photo: Allan Pang

      Allan Pang answered on 17 Jul 2012:

      I asked my paleontology friend and here is his answer:

      “There’s no agreed upon date for when humans diverged from “monkeys.” Obviously as you know we are apes, and our most single recent non-human ancestor would also have been an ape. The current models suggest we shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees between 5.5 and 4.5 millions years ago. The million year period probably had a lot of interbreeding going on muddling the gene pool.

      As for modern humans, we’re the last surviving members of the hominid line probably coming to our own around 200,000 years ago, with more modern human behavior at around 50,000 years ago. This is of course subject to change with new evidence.”

      – Sorry, can’t answer this on my own, so I asked an expert! Hope that helps!

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