We

We are all more closely related than you think. The traditional way to view how life developed on earth was in stages (as you can see to the right). The tree illustrates how all life was once one thing and progresses into being us, the most complex form of life on the planet.

However, since ever, there has always been a philosophical argument about where the root of the branches originates from. The old chicken or egg issue. It is now known that life started from simple inorganic molecules, which interacted to make other molecules which could replicate themselves. After this it was just a matter of billions of years (a blink of an eye in earth's history) before more complicated organic replicants came to being.

Once the earliest life was created it took another 3.5 billion years for it to make us. Whilst the stepped classification is useful to scientists, in fact the process is much more fluid. Similar to the roots of a tree branching out, although many stems are produced it is still the same macro organism.