Evolution of man – A true reveal about Man’s family tree

All the living races of man kind as they exist in the world of today belong to one species, Homo sapiens. This name expresses the fact that man is distinguished from other members of the animal kingdom, and more especially from the members of his own order and family which include monkeys and the great apes by the possession and habitual exercise of the specific quality of being able to reason. In the days of Darwin it was believed that all the species in the world of nature, each in its respective kind, were fixed and as God had made them in the beginning. But when once the doctrine of evolution was formulated and applied to the origin and development of the various forms of life, it was natural and inevitable that further questions should be asked had man always been what he is now? If not, what was he like before he became modern man as we know him? And if he had evolved from an earlier and more primitive form, had he any near relations who could be shown to have a like ancestry? Of these problems the last in particular raises an obvious issue. It is evident at even a casual glance that monkeys and the great apes bear a close resemblance to man, both in form and to a certain extent in behavior. It is owing to this similarity of form that zoologists have classified man and the great apes gorilla, chimpanzee, orang-utan and the gibbon, the diminutive member of the group, in one family as being closely related. So striking is this resemblance that it was believed by many in the early days of evolutionary theory that monkeys represented an ancestral form of man, and that man’s family tree could be traced back to one or other of the great apes, preferably the gorilla or the chimpanzee. More carefully detailed comparison and nervous system of man and the great apes showed that such a line of descent was not possible. It was found that instead of man’s anatomical characters showing a greater likeness to any one member of the group, to the exclusion of all the others, as would be expected if he were descended from that form, the resemblances were distributed fairly evenly over all members of the like the gorilla than any other ape, in other characters more like the chimpanzee, and so on, the balance, if any, being rather in favor of the little gibbon, with the chimpanzee, perhaps, as second. The conclusion to be drawn was not that man was descended from any one of the great apes as we know them, but that at some remote period in the history of the world, the monkeys, the great apes and man had a common ancestor, from whom all members of the family were descended and hose characters had been inherited in varying degree and with widely differing modifications and adaptations by each of the different members of the group. The apes were shown to be neither primitive nor rudimentary forms of man. Each in its kind, equally with man, is highly developed type.