I’m only there for the quizzes!
Twist!! The monkeys evolved from us. 
The question should be: Are we really here?
5 Likes
5 Likes
I think you may have just proved by analogy that monkeys>humans…
2 Likes
WHY won’t anyone think of the gibbons?
2 Likes
Exactly. I understood what they were trying to say, but I had about 5 different images floating around me noggin.
Yes, but apes on the whole are derived from monkeys; they and the old world monkeys are closer relatives than either is to the new world monkeys. Saying we evolved from monkeys isn’t so much wrong as missing a step.
It’s also not inherently stupid to ask why a primitive trait is still around. Because there are lots of cases where evolution does end up completely replacing older forms - the stem groups - and in some cases the reasons why or why not may be interesting.
For instance nearly all mammals today are viviparous; there were various egg-layers like multituberculates in the past that have all gone extinct. So it’s reasonable to suppose that live young are generally an advantage, and wonder if there is anything special about the platypuses and echidnas that has allowed them to hold out when all the other egg-laying mammals did not.
It’s just that in this case the answer is painfully obvious: there are still monkeys because they are better at, say, living in trees. So it might be a good question for a toddler, but if an adult still can’t figure it out, it’s probably because they haven’t really tried.
4 Likes
Dem italics…
1 Like
Thinking about them is gibbon’ me a headache 
3 Likes
Good point but my profs would still be disappointed at the wording, the distinction is important in understanding our evolution. Basically the word monkey is messy as it covers a mad range of animals that have little in common morphologically or ecologically and speaks nothing to the evolution of the many groups.
I’ve noticed before that it’s fascinating how common animal taxonomy differs from language to language. For whatever reason English tends to treat animal terms as disjoint while German tends to have terms for special cases of more general classes. So in common English usage an animal is either a monkey or an ape, while German treats the equivalent of “ape” as a special case of “monkey” and there is no real word for “monkey-but-not-ape”. Whales and dolphins are a similar example.
2 Likes
If a species wouldn´t exist anymore because another species evolved from it, there would only be one species, no?
5 Likes
Good god. What is this I don’t even
Possible solution: Kill all the monkeys?
Give us a bit of time… Most monkeys seem specialized enough that we will eventually destroy their niche.
1 Like
My standard response to anybody posing that question is this: Great Danes, coyotes, chihuahuas, foxes and Labrador Retrievers all descended from wolves - But there are still wolves, right ?
Turns out, research seems to indicate that domesticated dogs descend from a different wild canine which has been extinct for a long time. So there is a common ancestor with wolves, but it’s further back than that.
1 Like
Same like us and monkeys then? 
1 Like
Monkeys and humans descended from wolves? Science be crazy.
1 Like
