FactSentinel

Humans did not evolve from chimpanzees. Humans and chimpanzees are evolutionary cousins that share a common ancestor, a species that lived roughly 6 to 8 million years ago in Africa. After that point, the ancestral population split into separate lineages. One eventually led to modern humans, and the other led to today's chimpanzees and bonobos. Both lineages have continued to evolve ever since, so chimpanzees are not a "former stage" of humans but a living species with its own long evolutionary history.

The evidence comes from several independent fields. Genetic studies show that humans and chimpanzees share about 98 to 99 percent of their DNA sequences in comparable regions, a closeness that points to recent common ancestry. The fossil record includes a range of early hominins, such as Australopithecus and early Homo species, that show a gradual accumulation of human-like traits, including upright walking and larger brains. Comparative anatomy and molecular dating methods support the same branching pattern.

The misconception likely stems from the familiar "march of progress" image, which wrongly depicts evolution as a straight line from ape to human. In reality, evolution works more like a branching tree. A useful comparison is that two cousins share grandparents but one is not descended from the other. The common ancestor was also neither a modern chimpanzee nor a human, but a distinct species that has since gone extinct.