In 2017, actor-comedian Tim Allen famously tweeted a question that revealed just how little he understands about evolution. It seems he’s not alone. His tweet got almost 50,000 “likes” and 13,000 retweets. It’s safe to assume a lot of people reacting to Allen's post also wanted to know the answer to the question that he posed as a statement: “If we evolved from apes why are there still apes.”
The short answer is that "we didn't evolve from any of the any animals that are alive today,” says Zach Cofran, an anthropologist at Vassar College. That is to say, humans didn’t evolve from the gorillas we see at the zoo or the chimpanzees we snap pictures of on a safari. “It's a common misconception that apes are a step away from becoming human or something like a step along the way,” says Cofran. But, he adds, that’s not the case.
Charles Darwin, the naturalist best known for his theories of natural selection, described evolution “as ‘descent with modification,’” says Cofran. That means humans descended from common (and now extinct) ape ancestors that lived millions of years ago, a process also referred to as “common descent." While we share our ancestry with these animals, along the way, over millions of years, we all changed. "[We] each adapted to our own environments or specific circumstances or niches,” says Cofran. It’s believed that this human divergence from the chimpanzee lineage of apes happened between 9.3 and 6.5 million years ago.
