An infant gorilla on his mother’s back
The preponderance of the scientific literature tells a very different story. The story of our origins is an infinitely more complex story. To me, it’s even more wondrous and amazing than the story of Adam and Eve. This is a story of speciation, of natural selection, and evolution involving a multitude of successive generations inheriting genetic characteristics from common ancestors. A clear illustration of this is our kinship with gorillas which goes considerably further than skin deep. These phylogenetic trees are constructed using molecular data, based on similarities and differences between genetic and protein sequences.
The evidence shows that whilst we are not descended directly from apes, we share a common ancestor that probably lived 5 to 11 million years ago somewhere in Africa. As primates; we, gorillas and us, are on two very close branches of the same genetic tree. We are, in fact, genetic cousins.