To explain what is going on, we first need to take a bird’s eye view on the human and the Earth’s history.

This is the best illustration I could find.

If we compress the history of Earth into a 24-hour clock. The modern humans appeared in the last seconds of the last minute.

1. Formation of Earth: 00:00 (4.5 billion years ago)
2. First Life Forms (Prokaryotes): 01:15 (3.5 billion years ago)
3. Photosynthesizing Organisms: 02:00 (3 billion years ago)
4. Oxygenation of Atmosphere: 03:30 (2.4 billion years ago)
5. Complex Cells (First Eukaryotes): 04:45 (2 billion years ago)
6. Multicellular Life: 06:45 (1 billion years ago)
7. First Animals: 08:00 (600 million years ago)
8. Diverse Marine Life (Cambrian Explosion): 08:30 (540 million years ago)
9. First Land Plants: 09:45 (470 million years ago)
10. Dinosaurs: 11:15 (230 million years ago)
11. Dinosaurs Wiped Out: 12:45 (65 million years ago)
12. Early Human Ancestors: 14:30 (6-7 million years ago)
13. Modern Humans (Homo sapiens) Emerged: 17:45 (300,000 years ago)
14. The Last Ice Age: Ended around 11,700 years ago (23:59:48).

The whole dinosaur civilization was wiped out in about an hour and a half. And we just got here.

The tree of Life

Look at this beautiful chart. There is also an interactive version.

Life on Earth is one big extended family! Every human being is related genealogically not just to all other humans, but to all other living things. And not only organisms living today, but to everything that has ever lived.

The fact of life is we not only have common ancestors. We are related closer than one might think. This also applies to the evolution of our brain. We have common brain structures and behaviours as well.

Unlike animals, the newborn doesn’t recognize mother’s face, voice, or feel fear, nor do they understand dangers. This difference can be explained by the anatomy of the brain and the embryo’s developmental history. These science shows that a baby’s brain is far from being as developed at the time of birth as an animal’s brain. Out of the vast number of nerve cells, only a very few are fully developed when a child is born. The majority are underdeveloped and incapable of functioning.