The Primates - 60 Million Years Ago

Some six million years after the dinosaurs died the first primates began to live on earth. Primates are animals similar to monkeys and apes. The first primates were very small and resembled squirrels. They lived mostly in trees and were vegetarians.

Evolution is the mechanism by which life forms change from simple structures to more complex structures. Evolution is very slow and this explains why it took about 30 million years for the first primates to evolve from small squirrel like creatures to eventually change into monkeys. It then took another 10 million years for monkeys to evolve into apes from which the caveman eventually evolved almost 20 million years later. It took another 5 million years or so for modern man to develop from the caveman.

So to put things in perspective, the earth is about 5 billion years old and the first life forms didn't appear until about a billion years after that. And our ancestors the caveman didn't appear on earth until about 5 million years ago. So we are a very new life form on earth!

Primates originally lived in warm climates, as they still do today, in places such as Africa, Central America, and southern portions of Asia. Today, it is predicted that there are about 350 different species of primates on earth!