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Asked by shamail575 to Claire, Joanna, Kapila, Renata, Suzanne on 19 Jun 2013.
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Renata Medeiros answered on 19 Jun 2013:
You probably heard of a scientist called Charles Darwin. He lived in the 1800s and he asked himself more or less the same question which led him to develop the important theory of evolution which states (more or less) that animals evolve by adapting to their environment needs. So all the animals in the planet today evolved from other animals that existed before. When an animal moves to a different environment or the environment where the animal lives changes, little by little the babies of the babies of the babies (and so on) of these animals start to look or behave differently from the initial ones in order to be better adapted to the new environment.
So the reason why we look more like apes than like bears is more or less the same why we look more like people from your close family (for instance parents or siblings) than with those from a distant family (great aunt or distant cousin). You can imagine that going back many thousands of years ago monkeys, apes and people shared the same “grandparents” while people and bears only shared the same “great great great great grandparents”.
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Joanna Bryson answered on 20 Jun 2013:
We are more like apes because we are more closely related to apes — it’s like there are different kinds of dogs, there are different kinds of apes & we’re one.
But of course you can choose to act like a bear if you like! And we are more closely related to bears than we are to some other things, like ants. Also, bears like apes are big and eat both meat and plants, so there are a lot of ways we are similar really. Have you ever seen a bear swimming? With their fur wet they do look more like a person. I saw this in a zoo in Chicago that had a window into the polar bear’s swimming pool.
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