Imma say this only once in regards to the topic of evolution (OP may have unintentionally opened up a can of worms with this topic especially over a video game but this may in fact actually be a good reason to discuss something like this in-depth):
Did Man Come From Monkeys? 
Okay, let’s get something clear:
Scientists don’t actually claim that Man came from monkeys. No BS. They don’t. 
That’s a myth spread by religious folks, to make the idea of evolution seem more repulsive. And for Black people in particular, the idea of coming from monkeys seems especially heinous, considering how much abuse Blacks have endured at the hands of Cacs who called us monkeys, gorillas, and apes. The monkey part most definitely leaves a sour bitter taste in our mouths, and honestly, I can understand the resistance coming in from that perspective.
BUT the truth is, early Cac scientists
KNEW that the Black Man was the Original Man, so they made the “monkey connection” something we would hate, leaving us totally disinterested in hearing anything about our origins in this world (except for religious mythology of course, and you see how
THAT went for us!).
Either way, there’s no point in debating whether monkeys are actually quite respectable, because the scientific community
ONLY suggests just Man and monkeys share a common ancestor. This ancestor is often called a primate, which honestly doesn’t bother me much, since I understand the
root word of primate, primal, primordial, and primitive to be
prime, which means
FIRST. That’s what’s important to me and what should be important to you as well. Having said that, I understand that most people still find the connection discomforting, so we’ll use another term sometimes used for our common ancestors: Hominids. This basically means “like man”. The question is, how much like man and how much unlike?
While we certainly agree that the development of man was clearly a “development” involving several stages of transformation, what is unclear is exactly how far back we’d have to look to find Man when he was not yet Man. This is because there’s so many gaps in the fossil record, scientists are really guessing at how it all happened. Because most scientists still see modern Europeans as the highest state in human development, working backwards means they’re looking for something primitive and monkey-like in behavior and appearance. But just as a human is not “primitive” when it’s a baby, there no reason to view early man as some savage half-beast
The evidence doesn’t support that view either. In fact, remains of early ‘true’ primates still have not been uncovered in Africa. But that doesn’t stop mainstream science from reconstructing some imaginary ancestor of humans and monkeys, looking completely like a monkey, even when there’s no fossils of this so-called ancestor
Instead, the fossil record suggests that “evolution” may have been happening in two directions, with some groups of our ancestors becoming more like modern man, and other groups becoming more like modern monkeys. In fact, scientists are constantly finding hominid remains that rewrite the traditional timeline entirely. Whenever they find a “cousin” in our family tree that they didn’t know about (or imagine), they have to revisit the whole idea of what the earliest ancestor must have been. For example, a fragment of a pinkie finger excavated from a deep cavern in southern Siberia may point to a new species of ancient human. The 40,000 year old bone yielded DNA markedly different from that of modern humans or Neanderthals, challenging the current view of how our ancestors migrated out of Africa. The mitochondrial DNA of the unknown female hominid, whom they nicknamed “X Woman”
, differed from present-day human DNA at nearly 400 positions, twice the difference measured between human and Neanderthal DNA. The genetic patterns indicate that X Woman, Neanderthals, and modern humans shared a common genetic ancestor about a million years ago. One of the researchers suggested that X Woman may belong to a group of archaic humans who migrated out of Africa at a different time from Neanderthals or modern humans.
And while it was controversial enough of John Gribbin and Jeremy Cherfas to suggest that chimpanzees, gorillas, and humans diverged from a common ancestor only 5 million years ago (instead of the widely accepted 20 million years) in a 1981
New Scientist publication article, their next claim was even more shocking. Gribbin and Cherfas, after considerable fossil analysis, suggested that chimps, gorillas, and man descended from an ancestor that was
more man-like than ape-like. That is, chimpanzees and gorillas are descended from man rather than vice-versa. Of course, this idea didn’t go over well with the scientific community at the time.
But that same view that Gribbin and Cherfas had is finally getting some support from the mainstream. The relatively recent discovery of a 4.4 million year old hominid named
Ardipithecus ramidus (shortened to “Ardi”) pretty much killed the idea of a chimp-like missing link at the root of the human family tree. Fossil bones from Ardi and at least 35 other children and adults, dug up in the Afar desert in Ethiopia, suggest that our ancestors lived in lush woodlands and walked on two feet...before the hominid fossils that suggest we were hunched over in the grasslands. Okay, so even before Dinquenesh (Lucy) and Australopithecus,
we were more human than the science books have told us. And perhaps the more monkey-like Australopithecus wasn’t an ancestor of modern man, but was one of the many populations that went in the “other” direction. It makes sense, considering that nobody’s got the “missing link” to prove otherwise.
You may have heard about Mary-Claire King’s 1973 finding that 99% of DNA between human beings and chimpanzees is identical. But that’s not entirely accurate. Later research modified that finding to about 94% commonality, with some difference occurring in non-coding DNA. Even more recent research suggests that the commonality is 86% or less. That’s not so impressive, considering that humans have 60% identical DNA with fruit flies, 67% with mice, and 90% with cats. This new data makes us wonder whether our common ancestor was more like chimpanzees or more like us.
I know it sounds a bit crazy to suggest that chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas (considered Man’s closest relatives) descended from hominids that were more like man than like them. Biologist Richard Dawkins, in his book
The Ancestor’s Tale proposes that chimpanzees and bonobos are descended from
Australopithecus afarensis. French zoologist François de Sarre also argued that some of Australopithecines eventually evolved into gorillas and chimps. You read that right, the exact same people that scientists say we descended from.
That is, Australopithecus (a “human-like” mammal, who many scientists say gave birth to the
Homo *pause* lineage), gave birth to a species of mammals that became gorillas. Dawkins also archived that gorillas are descended from
Australopithecus robustus, who lived about 2.7 million years ago, and descended from Australopithecus afarenses as well. Well, if monkeys descended from the closest thing to man before man, it would certainly explain why the fossil record has more evidence of early man than monkeys.
Another study published in the esteemed journal
PLoS ONE, makes the argument that
Sahelanthropus tchadensis, a likely ancestor of Australopithecus who lived 7 million years ago, could have been the hominid ancestor of apes including chimps, citing a variety of evidence (such as anatomy and early bipedalism among others). The study’s author, anthropologist Aaron G. Filler, goes even further in his book
The Upright Ape: A New Origin of the Species:
“The first ‘human’ was probably Morotopithecus and probably lived 21 million years ago. The existing apes have a human ancestor.”
Other studies have corroborated Filler’s findings, showing that early hominids didn’t start out walking on their knuckles, and that apes actually developed this ability independently after splitting off from the last common ancestor with the human lineage.
Some have argued that Australopithecus wasn’t an ancestor of Man at all, and was another descendant of the lineage that became Man. Paleontologist Yvette Deloison believes that, 15 million years ago, there were 3 species of bipedal (walking upright on two feet) primates: one of them developed into hominids (Homo), another became the semi-bipedal, semi-arboreal (tree dwelling) australopithecines, and the third developed into quadrupedal orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees.
And let’s go back even further. Surely, if we go back another 40 million years, we’ll find ancestor who was on all fours, looking more like a money than Man, right? Wrong again
Recent studies of a well-preserved fossil dated to 47 million years ago reveals “an animal that had, among other things, opposable thumbs, similar to humans’ and unlike those found on other modern mammals. It has fingernails instead of claws. And scientists say they believed there is evidence it was able to walk on its hind legs.” Researchers report that this extraordinary fossil could be a “stem group” from which higher primates evolved, meaning monkeys, apes, and humans all descended from something that looked surprisingly more human than expected.
Does this mean that humans were around 700 million years ago, running from dinosaurs and shyt like the Flintstones? Or that there were humans around when life was forming in the Earth’s oceans 4 billion years ago?
NO, I’m not saying that. I’m only saying that the traditional timeline is flawed, and the traditional reconstruction of the “ascent” of Man is flawed as well. What I’m actually saying is that the fossil record suggests that the
common ancestor of man and monkeys was more like man than like monkeys.
Now we can get into the question that
@PS4 asked earlier.
So if monkeys could become man, than why do we still have monkeys? It appears that some of us went left, some went right, but that’s the nature of evolution,
which is NOT ALWAYS an “upward bound” kinda process that a lot of people can’t seem to grasp for whatever reason. Instead, much of evolution is about
variation, and whether the variations that arise will be able to survive and thrive in their environments well enough to grow and have descendants. In the end, who survived, out of all these variants?
Us.
Our journey was truly an odyssey, as it still is
and if you did, why your conclusion different than say somebody who dedicated their lives to the research? Because im assuming your belief isn't 1:1 with people who do that for a living...
Don’t start getting upset about me calling you out on that laughable bullshyt statement about humans having “dominion” over Nature 
A lot of atheists can be some overly smug b*stards but please tell me, how is that any different from a majority of you religious folks too? 
we can find all this other shyt but no links right. We walked the earth, wouldn't be impossible to find remains if your thought was true. We didn't live on the bottom of the ocean. You talking about diseases we evolved past yet you can't find the people who had it 
