That's really sweet! When we weren't being traumatised by Tufty and watching Willy Weasel get run over, we had the Green Cross Code man (who some people may know as the actor who played Darth Vader). For once they let him use his real voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLeK1LKZKiI But in other films in this series they dubbed him, and made him more insulting! Hey Dumbo! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_Qnan37HiU

If chimps were an ancestor of humans, they would have evolved into humans and would no longer be around anymore. They didn't. They share a common ancestor with humans, so neither species has really been around longer than the other.

A couple of "but how are humans and chimps related, then?" videos, just in case anybody wonders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkO8k12QCP0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cI6kNMxed8

Not sure if modern chimps existed before modern humans, but it's absolutely possible they did. Still distantly related, though. And there have been a lot of both chimp-like and human-like variations until the "modern" variations we see today. It's not like it went in a direct route from "primate ancestor --> modern human", just like it didn't go from "Primate ancestor --> modern chimpanzee". There were a lot of in-between ancestors, too.

This topic has strayed far and wide

I am disappointed that he doesn't sound like Darth Vader!



Apes are an ancestor of humans before humans split off and there are still apes. Not everyone evolves.

"Ape" is a broad category. Humans are also apes. That doesn't mean we are the same apes as the ones that lived 2 million years ago, and neither are chimps.



I never said they didn't exist before modern humans, I don't think anyone knows whether or not that is true (and species aren't defined that precisely, anyway). I'm saying they didn't "come before" humans. I didn't "come before" my sister just because I'm three years older than her.

(I have a similar accent to his, all ooh-arrr and aye! )

Owh, that second one made me jump. I will have to show my son that actor as he is a big Star Wars fan. Lol dumbo, that's how you know it was our era.

You certainly came into the world before she did. Does that mean that you did "come before" her? I think we're just arguing semantics here. If we're going to be really pedantic then "I'm three years older than her" is wrong. At school I was taught to say "I'm three years older than she", because "she" is being compared to the "I" in "I'm", so both "I" and "she" should be in the nominative case. "her" is accusative or objective case, which is clearly wrong here. What I'd actually do (and did even as a child) is repeat the verb, so I'd say is "I'm three years older than she is. (This is literally true of me and my sister!)

I have a Sim who won a SimCity-wide spelling bee, and he keeps me right when it comes to pedantry. If you don't agree, you should speak to Charity's Grammar Cat.

(Please don't take any of the above too seriously!!!)

Actually Tufty and the Green Cross Code were after my time. In the 50s and early 60s we were just taught to do our "kerb drill":

Stop and the kerb.
Look right.
Look left.
Look right again.
When no traffic is coming, walk quickly across the road.
Do not run.

I actually find that Tufty video quite shocking with its sudden intrusion of violence into this gentle childlike scene. Unfortunately Real Life really is like that! I think I prefer The Sims 2, where I've seen my Sim get out of a taxi and walk in front of it, whereupon the taxi started and drove right through them without harming them! Probably not what we want our children to see! Maybe that's why The Sims 2 got PG12/PG13 certification.

@Simsample Please don't quote me when I get too metaphysical. xD I can't delete my message afterward because of the quote. xD

I mean, if you want to be really technical about it, this is all incorrect. English does not have cases, and "she" and "her" are not in fact subject and object pronouns. "She" is the form of the pronoun that you use when it comes immediately before a verb, and "her" is the form that you use everywhere else. That's why "I am three years older than she is" actually sounds like something a real person would say. English teachers have gotten this idea that Latin grammar must be applied to English, so they pretend that English has things that Latin has, like cases, but this is actually just bullshit. You can tell that "I am three years older than she" is not correct English grammar, because native speakers of English never say this before they get told to by one of the aforementioned English teachers. The English language was not invented by English teachers, it is the language that people naturally learn when they grow up speaking English. There is no need to teach it to native English speakers, because they are already the foremost experts on it, by definition.

Poor Willy Weasel, I've seen him run over in a variety of situations (usually involving balls or ice-cream vans)! The 70s public safety videos were really quite grim, we had Charlie says... and a whole bunch of scary films! They showed these on TV throughout the 70s and 80s, so there's a good chance you might have seen them.

@Sokisims Oh, where did I quote you? This thread or elsewhere? I'll remove it if I can find it.

This thread, post 21. Although everyone has seen the original post by now lol.

Thank you! I removed that bit.

@Sokisims No worries! I don't mind removing things I quoted or posted.

I didn't think I implied that anyone was the same as a species 2 million years ago. And yeah, you did come before your sister. I came before my brother. Maybe we're ascribing different meanings to the words.

You literally said that apes have not evolved in the past two million years because "not everyone evolves".

Not everyone evolves INTO HUMANS! *sigh*

That makes absolutely no sense for the part of the conversation you said it in. We were talking about the fact that chimpanzees had in fact evolved in the past two million years.

Are we back to the "but X said Y, and Z got hung up in how it was said, and then X said it wasn't meant that way (getting meanings across is sometimes difficult, especially on the interwebz) and everything should in theory be okay, but for some reason the exact wording still matters very much to Z and they can't let it go" thing again?

---

The human species (Homini) and the chimp species separated somewhere between 5-13 million years ago (estimates vary). Both humans and chimps are apes (Hominidae/Hominoidea family).

Both are likely still evolving, we're just living in such a short timeframe where we don't see much evolving happening in real time, especially for larger species that take more time to evolve without any influence. Most of what we can see real-time comes from natural selection and mutation (There's also artificial selection, such as with dog breeding - but even if all of them look different, they still share a common ancestor in the wolf. Even most edible plants in the supermarket have been constructed through artificial selection).

Considering humans went from learning to walk on two legs, using fire and writing on cave walls, to researching the smallest building stones (DNA and atoms), travelling away from our own planet, figuring out (roughly) what lived on the planet millions of years ago, and generally not needing to live off the land, but let whatever the land has to offer come to us (so to speak - there's door-to-door delivery...), humans have likely evolved in plenty ways already, at least in brain power. Our brains growing a bit too large for our mini offspring is likely part of the reason we split off from the rest of the apes (unless the split happened first - I'm not sure, as I kinda got tired of skimming through Wiki at this point )


Anyway - we were (at first?) talking about Insim, not ape evolution, so it keeps on straying off into the distant past XD

Yes, that's what I'm saying. The point is that American English didn't somehow evolve from British English, just like humans didn't evolve from chimps. In both cases, they evolved from a shared ancestor that is older than both modern forms. I don't think this is hard to understand.

Well... On the first one you're not right. British-English absolutely did come before American-English (which wouldn't exist at all without British-English). They are two forms of the same language. There is a reason a lot of strange places in the world have English as their main language, and it's not because the same language spontaneously pops up on its own. Britain did love to put their mark absolutely everywhere, including in America/the US in the 1600s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compa...British_English
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language

For the second point, you're likely thinking about how languages share roots, for instance how Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch, Afrikaans, several Nordic languages, etc.) are a branch of Indo-European languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages

Can someone PLEASE lock this thread? It's devolved so far from the original topic of trying to log on to Insim that it's not even funny now.

Yes we will!! (i.e. We'll make it out of this alive)

No, modern British English did not exist 400 years ago anymore than modern American English did. Languages change over time, that's how different dialects form, yes, it's also how Proto Indo European and Proto Germanic differentiated into different languages, it's the exact same process, it hasn't stopped happening.