Did humans come from apes?
Humans *are* apes, descended from earlier apes. Our closest relatives are chimpanzees, and the most recent common ancestor of both humans and chimpanzees was approximately 6 million years ago. The way to understand our origins is to remember that living organisms are in a state of constant change – It’s not that evolution *can* occur, but that it *must* occur, simply because there is no mechanism in living organisms to ensure perfect, flawless reproduction for ever. Suppose you could study a population of chimpanzees in the jungle, on a timescale of millions of years. Clearly, each individual only lives a few decades, so the population is constantly being succeeded by individuals which are different from their parents, because reproduction is imperfect – and remember, this is *inevitable*. It can’t *not* happen. All the time this population is inter-breeding, the genes are getting mixed together, and only genes which work well with all other chimpanzee genes will tend to get passed dow
