How did humans evolve?

I know, this is a controversial subject because of the religious implications. First of all, I state for the record that humans did not evolve from apes. Monkeys, apes, gorillas and what have you evolved on separate paths from humans. Yes, we did evolve from a common ancestor species, but it wasn’t an ape.

Humans belong to the genus Homo and are considered a primate of the species Homo sapiens. Other primates include the great apes, monkeys, gibbons, gorillas, and lemurs and some of these are considered arboreal, which means they like to hang around in trees.

First of all you must ascribe to the theory that all life evolved from a common single celled species nearly four billion years ago. Not much is known about this whatever it was, except that its descendants adapted to utilize oxygen about 2.4 billion years ago. At first, these things reproduced asexually, which means that there was no sex. At some point they developed sexes and the fun began. Just kidding!

Eventually, chordates evolved about 530 million years ago. A chordate has a hollow dorsal nerve cord. They evolved into the vertebrates, which we humans are part of. All of this happened in the oceans and the obvious next step was a creature that resembled a fish. The fish species evolved into a tetrapod (means that it has four legs) about 390 million years ago. Eventually, this tetrapod amphibian developed lungs and walked out of the ocean onto land about 365 million years ago. Amphibians evolved into reptiles, and shortly after this around 256 million years ago, reptiles split off two branches, one of which was the Diapsids, which branched off to modern reptiles and birds. The other branch is Synapsida, which evolved into modern mammals. That’s what we humans are. To make this story go quicker, the Synapsids evolved into the Cynodonts, which became the mammals.

About 65 million years ago, some small nocturnal arboreal, insect eating little rodent crawled out of its hole and began the evolutionary journey to primates that by 35 to 25 million years ago evolved into a Hominin species that we are related to. The other branches became the great apes and monkeys.

The first Hominin genus was Ardipthecus at 4.4 million years ago and some branch of it evolved at 3.6 million years ago into Australopithecus. At this point this species was more advanced than any ape at that time or even now.

Homo habilis, the first known Homo species appeared about 2.5 million years as a more advanced Hominin type, and it evolved in Africa into Homo erectus at 1.8 million years. This species was the first species to walk around on two legs exclusively and the first to resemble humans.

Homo antecessor appeared at 1.2 million years ago and was a common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals, which were very much alike.

Homo sapiens appeared around 160 thousand years ago in Ethiopia. About 150 thousand years ago, Mitochondrial Eve appeared, a woman that all humans are related to. The reason they call her Mitochondrial Eve is because Mitochondrial DNA is passed through the female and our DNA is related to hers.

So, you see that although all life on Earth evolved from some common ancestor species millions of years ago, we humans didn’t evolve from apes.

Evidence for all of this came from many sources, mostly fossils found all over the Earth, but mostly in Africa. The best evidence is genetic, and it shows that we have DNA with many similarities to animal species. It’s hard to disregard this evidence that we have much in common with animals. We are after all artifacts of the planet Earth. How we got to where we are is superfluous to the argument of creation. What difference does it make how God made us or how long it took. The fact is that we’re here for a purpose and God has certainly indicated what our purpose is. And, as far as taking billions of years to evolve us, time means nothing to God. Enough said.

Thanks for reading.