Why do we live?

Answer

Dear Amelia,

The questions you ask are very obvious: I think everyone sometimes wonders how we got here, and why. But at the same time, these questions are very complicated and entire libraries are being written about them. Basically you are asking two questions: how did we get here, and why are we here? I will try to briefly answer these two questions.

You and I and all other living humans now belong to the genus Homo sapiens. That species has been around for almost two hundred thousand years and genetic studies show that it originated in East Africa and colonized the earth from there. But we should not focus on Homo sapiens: other human species lived with him. The Neanderthal is known, but recently, for example, the Flores man and the Denisovan have also been discovered. And if we go back in time it gets even more complicated, because the genus Homo has been around for about two million years. Our ancestors of that genus are also called humans, although they differed from us biologically and culturally much more.

Even before the genus Homo, there were primitive hominids, the Australopitheces being the best known. All in all, we can go back about 6 to 7 million years on our evolutionary line. You understand: we cannot pinpoint a time when the first man suddenly appeared on earth, but man as we know him today came after a gradual process of evolution from more primitive predecessors. But, as mentioned, for the sake of convenience, Homo sapiens, modern man, should only be placed in East Africa about two hundred thousand years ago.

There is of course much more to tell about this subject, the wikipedia page on human evolution is a good start.

Now the second part of your question: why do we live? From a scientific point of view (and this site is scientific) there is no “why”. Biological evolution has no fixed end goal and the fact that we are walking around here is a (provisional) end result of a process that lasts millions of years – even billions of years if you start at the origin of life on Earth.
Does life have no meaning at all? Yes, if we make sense of it ourselves :-).

Kris