The question of where we humans come from is one many people ask, and the answer is getting more complicated as new evidence is emerging all the time. For most of recorded history humankind has been placed on a metaphorical, and sometimes literal, pedestal. Sure, modern humans were flesh and blood like other animals. But they were regarded as being so special that in the Linnaean taxonomy that prevailed well into the second half of the 20th century they were given their own family, the Hominidae.
Explanation:
In the 19th century the only evidence available for determining the closeness of the relationship between any two living animals was how similar they were in terms of what the naked eye could tell from their bones, teeth, muscles and organs. Biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895). Wikimedia/Carte de Visite Fotografie. The first person to undertake a systematic comparative review of these differences between modern humans and the apes was English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley. In the central section of a small book he published in 1863, called Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, Huxley concluded that the differences between modern humans and African apes were less than those between African apes and orangutans. This was the evidence the English naturalist Charles Darwin referred to in The Descent of Man in 1871.
