• Question: What were monkeys evolved from?

    Asked by gigi123 to David, Helen, Ian, rhysphillips on 22 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Helen Fletcher

      Helen Fletcher answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      Monkeys belong to the ‘Placentals’ group of mammals, which bear live young. Just like hamsters. Scientists aren’t entirely sure what the mammal ‘family tree’ looks like, but we know that modern mammals have taken about 70 million years to evolve, originally from fish. Some adventurous (or hungry) fish got out of the water and started walking around, and thus evolved amphibians, and then from these came reptiles. Some of these early reptiles evolved into crocodiles, some into dinosaurs, and some into ugly things called ‘Therapsids’, which then evolved into mammals. The first mammals were around about 200 million years ago, and were small and hairy: a bit like a weasal. These split up into lots of different groups, such as hamsters, that evolved differently depending on the place they were living and, what do you know it, some of these became monkeys.

      So now you’re going to ask what fish were evolved from, right? Well that’s for another question..

    • Photo: Rhys Phillips

      Rhys Phillips answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      If only it was quite as simple as “A evolved into B” and “B evolved into C” – it’s actually a lot more complicated (and interesting) then that – each species evolved into several different other species on the way to evolving into something else. Many of these no longer exist.

    • Photo: Ian van der Linde

      Ian van der Linde answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      Monkeys evolved from simpler, less clever mammals. All current primates (orang utangs, chimps, bonobos, gorillas) will have had a common ancestor at some stage in evolutionary history, and this ancestor is also an ancestor of human beings. It is also the same ancestor shared by Neanderthals, and lots of other extinct creatures that stem from the same family tree.

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