"අපි පරිනාමය වුනේ වඳුරන්ගෙනුත් නෙමෙයි.
අපි, ඒ කියන්නෙ හෝමෝ සේපියන් ල සහ අපිට අද දකින්න ලැබෙන වානරයෝ (චිම්පන්සි, ඔරං ඔටං, රිලවා, වඳුරා, ගෝරිල්ලා) හැමෝම පැවතගෙන එන්නේ අවුරුදු මිලියන ගානකට කලින් ජීවත් වුනු එක් පොදු පූර්වජයෙකුගෙන්. මේ පූර්වජයා අද මේ ඉන්න වඳුරා කියන සතා නෙමෙයි. කෙටියෙන් කිව්වොත් වඳුරො කියන්නෙ අපේ ඥාති සහෝදරයෝ මිසක් මුතුන්මිත්තො නෙමෙයි. "
Yes.. This is correct. We the Homo-Sapiens
did not evolve from
modern day monkeys or a modern day ape like a Chimp.
We evolved and descended from a common ancestor that's long gone. This possibly happened millions of years ago (Estimated to be 7 Million years).
The only thing common is that we all belong to the ape family. We are just one branch. The other branches evolved too and ended up being modern day chimps, monkeys, gorillas etc who still live in the jungles. All these beings and us evolved from the
same ancestor.
We are able to compare species and their characteristics, including at the DNA and protein level.
Cladogenesis is the way to explain this. There are instances where one species “splits” into two species – this is referred to as
speciation event.
In short if we refer to clades there is the Hominidae, Hominoidea (apes), anthropoidea (simians) - these three are nested - Hominidae is inside Hominoidea, which is in turn inside Anthropoidea. There are many DNA similarites across them. Note that a human could be much of a simian as a macaque is, and an Orangutan is much of a hominid like human - but a macaque doesn't belong to the hominid family (being placed in the outer nested ring)
Human and Chimps share about 98.8 % of the DNA... The two species are vastly different yet related - and share similar traits. Chimps can get AIDS, hepatitis etc but small DNA differences in Chimp blood cells, allow them to escape from Malaria.
It's the DNA that finally determines everything, the human genome contains approximately 3 billion base pairs, so the difference of just 1.2% between the Chimp and us isn't small at all - its about
35 Million differences.