I read a really good way of visualising this in one of Richard Dawkins books (can't remember which one).
Imagine standing opposite a chimp and looking into its eyes. Take hold of your mothers hand with your right hand, the chimp does the same with its mother with its left hand. Each of the mothers hold hands with their mothers, your grandmothers, and the grandmothers with their mothers, your great grandmothers and so on, forming two lines stretching away into the distance. After only 70,000 mothers in each line the two individuals at the other end of the line looking into each others eyes would be members of the same species. Enough to fill a large sports stadium, that’s how close they are. Each animal in the line would show no discernable difference to its mother or daughter. For this trick to work we need to take time out of the equation but there are species alive today where this trick works in real time. They are called ring species.
I am grateful to you for bringing this piece of work of dawkins to my attention.
So in total about 140,000 generations. I have read about Mitochondrial Eve 'the woman from whom all living humans today descend, on their mother's side' and Y-chromosomal Adam, from whom all living people are descended patrilineally (tracing back along the paternal lines of their family tree only).
Mitochondrial Eve lived about 200,000 years ago, make me wonder how many generations Mitochondriall Eve is away from us, 140,000 from chimp to man in what 5 million years, (if I have this right) so one/twentyfifth gives us 5600 generations away.
Y-chromosomal Adam they say could be early as 70,100 thousand years ago, so at most 2800 generations ago.
It would be cool to write a movie about Y-chromosomal Adam, others may opt for Mitochondrial Eve but I'd say Adam would have been more dramatic. of course he wouldn't be the first man on earth, but a movie does call for some suspension of belief. Set in a fictitious garden of Eden, somewhere in the Rift Valley, population diminished by some natural disaster, say like Lake Toba and amonsgst the survivors, man v man, someone arises whho we could lable Adam. Lol
By the way, animals can have a "culture",
Some would say that apes at least have 'morality'.
Topic: question about evolution