Are humans apes?

Post Reply New Topic

Well, we evolved from a nonhuman primate that was an ape, but does that mean that we're apes? We also came from fish and bacteria, does that mean we're fish and bacteria?

Yes, we are apes.

Yes, but we're by far the most intelligent, artful, most advanced, yet most destructive/self destructive apes ever to walk the earth. We are indeed God's most incredible, and most terrible work.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

I'd say that we're hominoids, but not apes. The word "ape" refers to nonhuman hominoids.

Yes, we're great apes.

No, hominids and apes are the same thing. Specifically, they are the great apes. Humans have to be classified as apes in order for the ape family to be a complete clade.

I think we have a lot of similarities to Chimpanzees. I found this site from the Smithsonian.

Link

If we are Apes, is this a bad thing? We are more evolved in our own way, but I'd rather cuddle an ape than a lizard (if either was feeling cuddly.)

I think people who feel it to be insulting to be matched or familiar with apes, just do not know much about apes. There are not so many differences.

They mourn about died relatives, they recognize each other by face and personailty, they are having fun together and they aer able to help each other out when i danger. They are able to compassion with others, which are in danger or hurt. Orang Utans in Borneo are able to fish with spears. That means they are able to abstract thinking. It sounds simple, but you have to think of something that is not existing in the moment, and think of what you need to achieve it. So you need the idea first to know you have to gather a branch that has a usable form for the thing you want to create, a tool to use it fo prepare the branch to a spear and so on...There are ape groups who learned sign language and are really able to use it in a context matching for them and to combine words to meanings. So the began to call a melon a water - fruit on their own, or a christmastree became a sugar -tree and so on. Meaning that they must be really understanding the word sugar and the word tree and so on...So yes, they will not invent space ships and fly to the mars, but for me all these is similar to human kids of an age 3-4 years old, so i dont have problems to accept them as cousins.

No apes are apes and humans are humans, both are primates and mammals though.

We share a phylum with our hairy cousins.

ruveyn

Look up cladistics. Humans are apes as much the same way as we are mammals.

Well I certainly like bananas.

This.

The problem is that there is no such species as "ape".

The living primates that are called apes are a large group of both African and asian primate species that are related to each other, and are related to us, but some apes are closer to us than they are to other apes.

You could subdivide apes between the lesser apes and the greater apes.
Take the small asian apes, the gibbons, off the table and just talk about the "great apes". The category of great apes would embrace the large african apes and the asian orangutan. But even that smaller group would, cladistically, still include humans as one of the "great apes" since all of the african apes are closer to man than they are to the Orangutan.

So you could trim the family tree down further and talk about just "the African Great Apes". This category would embrace gorillas, chimps, and bonobos. But even this smaller category would also embrace humans because chimps and bonobos are closer to us in evolution than they are to gorillas.

So humans are a kind of African Great Ape.

But we are an unusually successful african ape that has spread out to the rest of the continents to become the first truly universal ape. In fact we may be the only truly catholic primate!

Not necessarily:

Yes. And it is pretty awesome.

/thread.

All humans are apes, but not all apes are humans. That's how it works. Of course a lot of people take offense at this biological fact. It also depends on what definition you use. According to some colloquial usage, humans are not apes because apes are not human. But in a bigger and scientifically more accurate sense, yeah we are apes. We can also be thought of as highly derived fish, although we are more distantly related to our fishy cousins than we are to our ape cousins (a few hundred million years since a common ancestor compared to only a few million years since a common ancestor).