Apes And Humans Essay Research Paper APES

Apes And Humans Essay, Research Paper APES AND HUMANS INTRODUCTION Humans have always been fascinated by other apes. Perhaps it is because we are the only animals that are conscious of our place in evolution. The similarities other apes and us share are obvious, and different cultures have been aware of this bond since millennia. But there is also the idea that God created the Earth and all around and in it. I m not a person that is very religious, but I can t believe that we the theory that we come from apes. Evolutionary design of man has lead anthropologists to travel the world in search of fossil evidence to learn who we have evolved from. Human evolution began roughly 5-10 million years ago when the human line split from the apes. Slowly scientists have tried to put the

pieces together to give us an idea of our evolutionary line.(Charlon). In Mesopotamia, monkeys were cult animals sacred to some god (Weitz 124). Moreover, it is not difficult to find all around the world myths such as the one that describes apes as being a human figure that a god was making out of clay which slipped out of his hands and hence got a tail. Therefore, the question shouldn t really be what makes other apes and humans similar, but actually, what are the differences between us. To get a sense of our origins we must be able to separate primate characteristics from the traits that are unique to our lineage (Weitz 231). ANALISIS Let s take a person, strip him, put him in a cage next to a gorilla or an orang-utan, and ask ourselves: What makes of us humans a weird,

different type of ape?. The first obvious difference, starting our analysis from head to toes, is the cranial capacity. Our head is much bigger compared to the body and our brain weighs much more. This is due to the fact humans have a highly developed intelligence, (being, in fact the most intelligent animal on Earth). This has allowed us impressive communication techniques; the development of tools, (from stone artifacts in the Paleolithic to a nuclear bomb); and the possibility to understand to a certain extent our condition on Earth and the natural process that take place in our environment (Charlon 45). The next obvious difference is the lack of bodily hair in humans. Compared to a gorilla or to a gibbon we are practically bald and naked. We have learned to change the

characteristics of our environment, (such as temperature and humidity), by using tools, but other apes still live under conditions that include rain, cold, thorns. Hair is therefore a useful protection that humans no longer need (Charlon 60). If we continue going down the head, we will find that humans jaws are not as robust; they are lighter and straighter, (giving us the peculiar characteristic of having a chin). Our teeth have shrunk backwards and lost special characteristics used by apes to chew leaves or eat fruits. Lips in man are poor in fat, and the upper lip shows a central furrow, (the philtrum) running down from the nasal septum to the edge of the membranous lip, the boundary which is elevated at the edges of this furrow (Hooton 56). SHARED ERRORS IN THE DNA OF HUMANS

AND APES Science has always been a big problem for the religion, there always has been controversy about the creation of the world and how we were created. Have we evolved from the monkeys or did God created us??? It always has been claimed that there are shared errors in the DNA between humans and apes, and that this shows that humans and apes must have a common ancestor, because the Lord would not have inserted common errors in their DNA (Plaisted). These errors are generally in the form of pseudogenes, which are genes that have lost their function for some reason, often because control sequences around them are not present. Here are some thoughts about these shared errors in DNA. The following material has extensively been modified since Edward Max’s first response to it: 1.