Evolution 3: Kids' Page 5
Chimpanzee drawing courtesy of Primate Gallery. You can learn more about chimpanzees by going off-site to Chimpanzee Fact Sheet or Animal Bytes: Chimpanzee. You can learn more about human evolution and see 3D pictures of skulls by going to Human Evolution: the Fossil Evidence in 3D.
There are many ways in which evolution works. Another important theory about evolution is that every living thing evolved from other living things down to a common ancestor. Many people get confused about this, and think people evolved from modern apes, or worse yet monkeys! However, nothing alive today can be called our ancestor; everything alive today is fully modern. Also, it helps to look at how life evolved, not as a ladder, but as a branching tree, with all the modern species being at the tips of branches. Both modern apes and humans did have a common ape ancestor, but that ape was very different from apes alive today. The type of modern ape that is the most closely related to us, (and therefore has more genes that are similar to ours), is the chimpanzee. The picture at the top of this page is of a chimpanzee, or chimp for short. Remember, though that chimpanzees are not our ancestors; they would be more like a sibling (brother or sister) species.
To learn about a modern example of the evolution of a new species, Go on to Evolution 4: Kids' Page 6
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