I Was Never Taught Where Humans Came From

Here’s what I remember from biology class at my public high school in Texas: We learned everything there is to know about the Krebs cycle. We collected bugs in the heat and suffocated them in jars of nail-polish remover. We did not, to my recollection, learn much of anything about how the human species originated.

Most scientists believe that the beings that would become humans branched off from the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, about 6 million years ago. We did not learn this part—the monkey part. That is, our shared ancestry with other primates. Because this was nearly 20 years ago, and memories tend to fade with time, I checked with several friends who went to the same high school at the