Plato classified humans as “featherless bipeds”, were there any ancient philosophers or teachers that guessed correctly that humans were evolved from or related to apes?

by Gates9
voltimand

No, but some ancient philosophers had views that answered the same sorts of question as theories of evolution: how did humans come to be, and did they come to be from some other animal?

Mind you, we don't have much in the way of textual evidence for this besides some scant fragments.

Here, for instance, is a report of Anaximander's view:

Wherefore they (the Syrians) reverence the fish as of the same origin and the same family as man, holding a more reasonable philosophy than that of Anaximandros; for he declares, not that fishes and men were generated at the same time, but that at first men were generated in the form of fishes, and that growing up as sharks do till they were able to help themselves, they then came forth on the dry ground (Plut. Symp. viii. 730 E).

The passage doesn't elaborate on Anaximander's view but the thought seems to be that fish existed before humans, and the human race was once fish-like, then shark-like, and then these proto-humans learned to live on the ground. Somehow our bodies are able to change in accordance with the environment of living on the ground (but also somehow our bodies were able to change before we came on the ground such that we were able to be ready for terrestrial life, too).

Here is Empedocles:

On it (the earth) many heads sprung up without necks and arms wandered bare and bereft of shoulders. Eyes strayed up and down in want of foreheads (fr. 57).

Solitary limbs wandered seeking for union (fr. 58).

But, as divinity was mingled still further with divinity, these things joined together as each might chance, and many other things besides them continually arose (fr. 59).

Shambling creatures with countless hands (fr. 60).

Many creatures with faces and breasts looking in different directions were born; some, offspring of oxen with faces of men, while others, again, arose as offspring of men with the heads of oxen, and creatures in whom the nature of women and men was mingled, furnished with sterileparts (fr. 61).

Come now, hear how the Fire as it was separated caused the night-born shoots of men and tearful women to arise; for my tale is not off the point nor uninformed. Whole-natured forms first arose from the earth, having a portion both of water and fire.These did the fire, desirous of reaching its like, send up, showing as yet neither the charming form of the limbs, nor yet the voice and parts that are proper to men (fr. 62).

Empedocles thinks that human beings arose by chance. Basically, what happened is that living things arose, and the first ones were very simple beings: limbs, heads, etc. But none of these could survive. But because nature was throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck, so to speak, eventually things that could survive did come to be: humans. There seems to be a weird part of this theory about how the simple beings eventually joined together to create humans, but there's not enough information there to make sense of this process. Empedocles does have some theories of physics that might make sense of this: things that are like each other attract each other, for instance, so perhaps the heads that roll around attract the limbs that are shambling around, and so on.

It is also worth pointing out (in relation to the mention of Plato in your title) that Plato doesn't believe in a theory like this. He thinks that humans were the first mortal creatures to come to be, and their bodies were hand-crafted by immortal servants of the craftsman god that we often call the Demiurge (coming from demiourgos in Greek, meaning 'craftsman'). Non-human animals are the products of these immortal servants too but these living creatures come into existence in the second generation as the reincarnated souls of vicious humans. Plato does often express views (such as in the discussion of the 'featherless biped' bit of the Statesman) that suggest that all living creatures are equal, none more noble than another, lumping humans and pigs together, but this probably has more to do with the theory of reincarnation's suggestion that all living creatures have the same kind of soul in them.