• Question: how did humans change from monkeys to how we are now? do you think that in about 1000 years humans would have changed?

    Asked by kaylee222 to Alan, Nick on 21 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Alan Fitzsimmons

      Alan Fitzsimmons answered on 21 Mar 2014:

      We changed from apes (not monkeys!) by evolution. Over time, small changes in genes change one type of animal into another type. Evolution works over many many generations, so our human species evolved from our ancestor species over hundreds of thousands of years. If we just left everything alone, it would take a similar time to evolve into another species.

    • Photo: Nick Wright

      Nick Wright answered on 21 Mar 2014:

      We evolved our of apes by a process of lots of small random changes to our DNA sequence, which slowly made us better suited to our environment. Each change was random though, so some changes were good and some were bad. If a mutation was good the people who got that mutation were more likely to survive and reproduce than those who got a bad mutation, and so evolution can actually appear like a sequence of intentional good mutations, even though the process is random.

      Its hard to know of humans will continue to evolve, because now we are capable of changing our environment around us we are not so dependent on it for our survival and small mutations may not have such an impact.

Comments