can someone explain to me, please excuse my stupidity, what is meant by a common ancestry with apes, are you saying we are very closely related or that at sometime men and apes were one in the same thing?
Let's look at a human family tree, in fact let's use mine.
So there's my grandfather, who had four children, my father, my two aunts, and my uncle.
My father had my brother and me.
One aunt had two sons.
Another aunt had two sons and a daughter.
My uncle had two sons and a daughter.
Most of my cousins now have children of their own.
So take any one of my cousins or their kids and me, what is our most recent common ancestor? That would be my grandfather.
The same principle applies on a much larger scale with regard to talking about, for example, the most recent common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees. About five million years ago the lineages that would become humans and chimps diverged, but there were neither humans nor chimps then; just the most recent common ancestor of both.
Which means we didn't come from chimps, it means that chimpanzees are our, in a sense,
cousins.
We have even more distant cousins in the other great apes--the gorillas and orangutans. But go back far enough in time and you will find the common ancestor of all the great apes: humans, chimps, gorillas, and orangutans.
-CryptoLutheran