Question: why are apes and that like us so much?

Ciarán O'Brien answered on 12 Nov 2014:

It’s mostly because our DNA is very, very similar. Apes and humans evolved from a common ancestor millions of years ago. This original species lived in very diverse areas, and all life adapts to best fit its surroundings. So part of the species might have lived on grassy plains and next to coastlines and ate lots of fish and cereals, while another part was happy to live in forests and climb trees looking for fruit and nuts, and another part might live up north where it’s cold and lived on things like seals and polar bears!

Over time, they became much more suited to living where they lived, and became more and more different as their DNA adapted to their environments. Over millions of years, they became so different that they couldn’t have kids with each other any more (We call that speciation, when a species splits into two different species). One side of the family became what we know as apes, the other side became early humans.

It’s a bit more complicated than that, there are many types of ape from chimpanzees to orangutans to gorillas, and there used to be many types of human too, like neanderthals and Homo floresiensis and Homo habilis. We’re not sure why, but only one species of human made it this far, and that’s us, Homo sapiens. Maybe the species of apes were just better evolved to live together than any of the humans?

Archaeologists are always on the look out for more fossils of early humans, we still don’t know much about them and every fossil lets us learn something new about our ancestors.