Are we really descended from Apes?

The quick answer is NO! Apes are more like cousins than ancestors. At some point in deep time we went one way, they went another. We share the same common ancestor, but they are not our ancestors.

As a matter of fact, all life on Earth shares a common ancestor whether you’re human, an ape, carrot, broccoli (echhh), fish, bird, oak tree—you get the idea. The common ancestor of all life on Earth was a single celled organism that lived billions of years ago.

How can we be related to a broccoli? That’s a plant not an animal.

All life on Earth shares the same cellular chemistry, cell structure, DNA and is either a single cell or made up of cells working together. What makes sense is that the problem of deriving energy from food, a means of passing on heredity, reproducing and all the necessary structures of a cell were solved by single-celled organisms, probably around two and a half billion years ago.

Some of their descendants branched off to become plants or animals, branching and branching through billions of years of evolution to populate the Earth with all the millions and millions of species living or extinct. The odds that millions of different living things evolved the same chemistry, hereditary material, and cellular structure independently are so beyond astronomical as to be non-existent. That means we are related to every living thing, even broccoli, because all living things descended from those single celled ancestors.

What about our supposed Ape ancestor? Well, we branched off from the nearest ancestor common to both of us around five to seven million years ago.

You know, if you think about it---we do kinda look alike.