If you think the common ancestor of humans and apes is a chimpanzee... well, you're completely wrong. Chimpanzees should be considered our closest cousins, not ancestors. We generally tend to think that humans "descended from apes," but that's precisely the mistake; we are apes (i.e., without tails). In English, the term "Great Apes" (gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans) is used to distinguish them from monkeys (apes with tails).

To understand our origins, we need to take a step back in time within the order of Primates. These are divided into two major branches:

The prosimians primarily include nocturnal animals found in Africa and Southeast Asia, such as lemurs, lorises, and tarsiers.
The anthropoid apes, or true monkeys. Within this group, our subfamily, the great apes, diverged 20 million years ago. These apes are characterised by larger size, the absence of a tail, and larger cranial capacity.
As the genus Homo, we belong to the large family of hominids. Fossil evidence and DNA analysis have shown that chimpanzees and we share a common ancestor that lived between eight and six million years ago. From this divergence, a second group emerged, to which we belong: the hominins. This group refers to all species that share characteristics similar to ours, such as Australopithecines, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and Neanderthals.

The identification of our common ancestor remains controversial to this day, with a number of species vying for the "throne" of prehistoric hominins.

If the very first steps of this journey are still shrouded in mystery, the landscape becomes significantly clearer when we encounter one of our most famous ancestors: Lucy, a specimen of Australopithecus afarensis, who lived between 4 and 3 million years ago. This species represents a bridge between the Great Apes and modern humans: marked sexual dimorphism, a small skull measuring less than 500 cm3, long and strong upper limbs, hands "designed" for climbing trees, small canine teeth, more similar to us than to modern gorillas or orangutans, and above all, Lucy was bipedal, not an "ape" as commonly imagined. We can consider her one of the first building blocks of human evolution and our history.