The Chicken or the Egg
One morning while driving my elementary students to school, I had a first grader ask me if monkey has had thumbs. I was rather confused by the question but I answered him with “yes monkeys do have thumbs.” I continued on my route and he asked me “don’t we come from monkey’s Ms. Vanessa?” after the shock of the question I told him, “some people do believe that but I don’t.” Of course, this question can be answered very simply by all of us. Each person can say, "I came from my parents”, where did your parents come from? "They came from my grandparents!” and so-on. These answers true, but they do not get us back to the very beginning. We know who our parents are and who our grandparents are, but where do humans come from? If we could climb into a time machine and go back in time to the very beginning, what would we find? Many students in our schools are taught human evolution (often in the social studies class!) by teachers having little knowledge of human anatomy, or of ape anatomy. It is useless to consider the fossil evidence for the evolution of man from apes without first understanding the basic structural and functional differences between human and ape.
Has man always been in existence or was there a time when man was not here? Everyone agrees that there was a time when there were no men on earth and a time when there was no earth! Even those who do not believe the Bible believe these facts. Today there are billions of people on earth. However, the question he asked made me stop and think, why this question is so often asked when the answer is probably in every home on the bookshelf or coffee table.
Human evolution is the lengthy process of change by which people originated from apelike ancestors. Scientific evidence shows that the physical and behavioral traits shared by all people originated from apelike ancestors and evolved over a period of approximately six million years. There are many ideas about how man began, and only one...