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Humans are directly descended from prehistoric apes, but it can be argued that, yes, we are in fact descendants of a group of fish that began crawling on land around 400 million years ago. In fact, all animals with four limbs today (including us) are share a common ancestor found in a group of fish that had four strong bony fins. These fish also had lungs, and their fins helped hoist them out of the water, usually to travel from one pool to another, or to breath air when oxygen was scarce in the water.

Some of these fish became more and more adapted to spending time on land, and so groups branched out including the amphibians and reptiles. After millions of years, one group of reptiles became warm-blooded and started growing hair. They evolved into the mammals, and as you may know humans are mammals.

How do we know all this? There are a lot of fossils from different rock layers which give us clues into how life developed over many millions of years.

Actually, every single organism on Earth, from the smallest bacteria to the largest mammals are all related to one another in some way through a common ancestor that first appeared billions of years ago. All life branched out from that one microscopic organism that lived in the ocean so long ago. All life is connected into one giant evolutionary tree, with little branches which eventually lead to one trunk: our last common ancestor.

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12y ago

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