• Question: What caused apes to evolve?

    Asked by anon-193419 to Morwenna, Jamal, iainstaniland, Heidi, Emma, Carl on 11 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Carl Heron

      Carl Heron answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      Apes evolved in the same way that other species evolved on Earth. Charles Darwin called the process ‘descent with modification’. I won’t explain the full details here as it will take too long!

      The great apes live in tropical rainforests. It is thought that human evolution started when a group of apes began to live more in the savannah. Savannah is more open, with trees, shrubs and grass. This group, the australopithecines, started walking on two legs. They began to use their hands to carry things. Life in the open was different, and there was a big advantage in having better brains. Their brains grew larger, and they began to make simple tools. This began at least 5 million years ago. We have fossils of two or three different groups of walking apes, and one was the ancestor of humans.

    • Photo: Emma Crawford

      Emma Crawford answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      Human evolution is the lengthy process of change by which people originated from apelike ancestors. Scientific evidence shows that the physical and behavioral traits shared by all people originated from apelike ancestors and evolved over a period of approximately six million years.
      The process of evolution involves a series of natural changes that cause species (populations of different organisms) to arise, adapt to the environment, and become extinct.
      Evolution occurs when there is change in the genetic material — the chemical molecule, DNA — which is inherited from the parents, and especially in the proportions of different genes in a population.
      Over time, genetic change can alter a species’ overall way of life, such as what it eats, how it grows, and where it can live. Human evolution took place as new genetic variations in early ancestor populations favoured new abilities to adapt to environmental change and so altered the human way of life.
      For more info: http://humanorigins.si.edu/education/introduction-human-evolution

    • Photo: Heidi Gardner

      Heidi Gardner answered on 12 Nov 2018:

      Evolution isn’t actually something that is caused – so a change in environment doesn’t cause an animal to grow or act in a different way. What happens is that when the environment changes, those animals that have characteristics that help them to survive, survive to reproduce, and the animals that don’t have those traits do not. So as Carl said in his answer below, when a group of apes moved into the savannah, the ones that were able to use their hands to carry things for example, had more of a chance of survival as they were able to gather food more effectively. Slowly, over time, these new characteristics became the new normal and so gave rise to a new species.

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