Are we descended from apes and chimpanzees? Good question and one expert, Robin Crompton of the University of Liverpool, says it's the other way around.
Based on the fossilized bones of a 3.7 million year old human ancestor, Austrolipithecus, Crompton believes that our early ancestors lived in trees and were bipedal, they could walk upright. Chimps and other monkeys went on to knuckle drag in the interests of speed and ease but we didn't.
This means that the apes and ourselves, for that matter, come from a common ancestor that's more like us than some kind of chimp and that we took the high road and the apes didn't. Well done, human forebearers, you made the right choice.
Well so what. So a lot. We've been taught that humans started out as chimps, got bigger, became apes and then somehow became rational or irrational human beings. Ascent of the Species and thank you very much, Darwin, Boom.
But this lineal progression may not be true. Something very like a human existed in the happy canopy of the trees, according to Crompton, and advanced on. Others, coming from the same stock devolved into bestial apes, leaving us where we are today.
I'm no expert but maybe Crompton has a point, his early hominin fossil seems to say so, but consider this. When did monkeys become rational? When did apes start to reason?
We did, at some point, albeit imperfectly. When and how did this happen and why didn't it happen for the rest of the monkeys and still hasn't now. No one knows but it should have done, right?
If we all come from a common arboreal ancestor and the ability to reason is simply part of the evolutionary process, then the monkeys that devolved from us should be able to pick up the plot, but they haven't.
Perhaps they're evolutionary dead ends. But serious question. There's a massive leap from irrational animal to rational human. How did that occur and if it could do so for us and not our ape allies, then why not?
After all, we have a common ancestor, or not.
Harambe Weeps,
LSP
