Question: why do we look like this and why do we not look like animals

Zoe Vance answered on 18 Mar 2025:

I would say we do look quite like animals – a bit more hair and put us on all fours and we look like a lot of other mammals. The lack of fur and standing on two feet do make quite a difference though!

There’s still some debate on why we have those specific features. It’s difficult in general to trace back why specific features evolved, and it’s not impossible that some things kind of just happened! Features that don’t really help but also don’t hurt can just be there sometimes. But walking on two feet is a particularly weird one because in many ways it’s a pretty bad idea – the changes to our bodies that allow that put more stress on our spines and also make it much harder to have babies. So it must have provided some benefit. There are some ideas that maybe it freed up our hands for other activities, or that when we were living in hot climates mostly on big exposed plains it meant less of us was exposed to the sun (only the top of the head, rather than most of the body on four legs) but I don’t think the question is fully settled.

Similarly for losing our fur, it might also have had to do with regulating our temperature, we were engaging in a lot of activity in very warm temperatures and it seems quite possible that losing the hair and evolving the ability to sweat was very useful to our ancestors.