Many people
used to get extremely upset at the ill-formed notion that “man descended from
the apes.” Such words were much more likely to start fights or “monkey trials”
than the correct notion that all living animals, including man, ascended or
evolved from a single-celled organism which lived in the primeval seas hundreds
of millions of years ago. Men are mammals, of the order called Primates, and
man’s living relatives are the great apes. Men didn’t “descend” from the apes
or apes from men, and mankind must have had much closer relatives who have
since become extinct.
Men stand
erect. They also walk and run on their two feet. Apes are happiest in trees,
swinging with their arms from branch to branch. Few branches of trees will hold
the mighty gorilla, although he still manages to sleep in trees. Apes can’t
stand really erect in our sense, and when they have to run on the ground, they
use the knuckles of their hands as well as their feet.
A key group
of fossil bones here are the South African australopithecines. These are called
the Australopithecinae or “man-apes” or sometimes even “ape-men.” We do not
know that they were directly ancestral to men but they can hardly have been so
to apes. Presently I’ll describe them a bit more. The reason I mention them
here is that while they had brains no larger than those of apes, their hipbones
were enough like ours so that they must have stood erect. There is no good
reason to think they couldn’t have walked as we do.
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