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"But if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"
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First, I am not going to give you the common brush off to your question: "We didn't evolve from monkeys, monkeys and humans share a common ancestor". That's just avoiding the question, and frankly, I don't agree with it. I'm going to assume that when you say "monkey," you not only include those animals called monkeys that are alive today, but also animals that looked and behaved like monkeys that lived millions of years ago. An animal that lived about 40 million years ago, known as Aegyptopithecus, is believed by scientists to be a direct ancestor of humans. If I saw that animal swinging through the tree branches today, I'd certainly call it a monkey.

I'm going to go one step further and assume that you are using the term monkey even more colloquially, and include chimpanzees and gorillas under the general umbrella ofmonkeys. Technically those are apes, but since they are non-human primates that are indeed decended from monkeys, let's go ahead and let that one by. So below, I'm going to cover a scenario whereby humans might have evolved from apes, while leaving apes still existing.

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Around 7-10 million years ago, there was a population of apes in the forests of Africa, all of which were interfertile with all the others. These apes probably roughly resembled modern day gorillas, chimpanzees or bonobos ("pygmy champanzees"), but were not identical to any of them. Nor were they interfertile with any ape or human alive today.

The forests eventually reached the maximum capacity of these apes per square mile as it could support. Like modern chimpanzees, it is likely that various bands of the apes fought with and killed members of adjacent bands, with winners taking over the territory from losers. Even in the absence of fighting, there is a limit as to how many animals an environment can support, so the number of apes stabilized at this number.

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Over hundreds of thousands of years, more and more of the apes spread out farther and farther into the savanna. They continued to adapt to the savanna, becoming different in appearance and behaviour from those in the forests, much as coyotes differ from gray wolves today. The apes that lived near the border of forest and savanna looked and behaved like a cross between those living deep in the forest or far into the savanna, much as red wolves look and behave like a cross between coyotes and gray wolves. Like coyotes, gray wolves and red wolves, all of the apes -- whether living in the forest or the savannah -- were interfertile with all the others, as they were still fairly close relatives and therefore genetically similar.

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As time went on, the apes living in the forest became separated by more and more generations from the apes in the savanna. No longer were any of the apes interfertile with all of the others, not even the ones living in the transition territories. As populations ebbed and flowed, various bands moved about, took over territory of others, suffered from diseases and starvation and predation and changing climates -- eventually there became a day that the last "interfertility link" between the forest apes and savanna apes died. This day came and went without fanfare, as interfertility is a hypothetical concept: it is unlikely that any of forest apes had even tried to breed with any of the savanna apes for thousands of years prior to the point it became theoretically impossible.

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One final point I'll make to avoid upsetting the scientists: the more we learn about the path from ape to human, the more we know just how messy the process really was. I described it as a fairly neat process, one group evenly and gradually splitting into two over the course of a couple million years or so. In reality, there appear to have been numerous partial splits, and numerous different fluctuating populations with various degrees of interfertility (and actual interbreeding) between them. Most splits led to eventual extinction, Neanderthal man being a well known (and relatively recent) example. Certain chance events happened along the way, for instance there is evidence a jaw mutation that reduced biting power allowed the brain to grow bigger. In the forest that mutation was a disadvantage, but in the savanna the additional cognitive power given by the larger brain outweighed the loss of bite strength.

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It hasn't even been conclusively proven that we are not still interfertile with chimpanzees: some people speculate that a hybrid may be possible, although personally I would bet against it. All indications are that modern humans would be interfertile with Neanderthals. Likewise, modern chimpanzees are interfertile with bonobos, although there is no interbreeding in the wild between the two species as they are separated by the immense Congo River.







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Why there are still monkeys? Ambot bitaw nganong nia man lang gihapon...



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