"After the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, mammals gradually became the most dominant life form on earth, the most intelligent of the mammals being the primates, and the most intelligent of the primates, the apes. Due to the separation of the South American, Eurasian and African continents beginning some 150 million years ago, the primates in these three areas afterwards evolved separately. In Africa, apes diverged from monkeys about 23 million years ago, with humans descending from these African apes, our branch splitting off from the ancestors of chimpanzees perhaps as recently as five and a half million years ago, and no earlier than eight million years ago."