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You aren't explaining what caused us to survive, and them to die?
You want specific reasons why our line survived and others didn't?
To start with not all extinct species 'died off.' Species is something of an arbitrary concept. For example, start with a gallon can of white paint. Every day put a drop of red in the can and mix it up. Take a photo every day as well. From day to day, you won't be able to tell that the color is changing, but when comparing photos taken weeks apart, the change will be obvious. Now, you can choose to call some photos 'white paint' and some photos 'pink' or 'red.' But it doesn't mean that each represents a different can of paint. Evolution is like that. Consider the can of paint to be a population of animals. Each molecule of pigment in the can is an individual. The red drops represent a mutation that confers some benifit to its carriers. As that trait increases the 'color' of the population changes until it reaches a point were we decide to call the group a different species. In this case, nothing has died out. Individuals have died, but the population is continuous. All living organisms represent the tail end of such a continuous population-- different population for different animals.
In our case, the australopithicenes changed like the paint into genus homo and one of the early species of that genus changed into us. They didn't exactly die out, they just changed to the point that we renamed them.
Some lines, of course, do die out. We don't know exactly why in most cases. Gigantopithicus probably succumbed to enviromental changes. It was very specialized and specialized critters are vulnerable to changing environments. Neanderthals were extremely good in cold weather, but it warmed up. In particular, neandarthals had a nasal structure that would have been a life-saver in the cold but in a warm environment it would have acted as an incubator for whatever bacteria the poor saps encountered. Death by head cold.
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So being that there were only slight differences, why did they not survive along side of us.
Why does your great-great-great grandmother not survive along side of you? That is really the question you are asking.
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And I don't understand why if the basic apes could survive extinction, why is it they (the apes) and us are the only ones to survive?
The 'basic' apes? There is no such thing. All of the apes are adapted to a certain range of conditions.
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That just doesn't make any sense.
What doesn't make sense? A hundred people start the marathon, not all finish it. This is true even among people who train for the races.
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Also, I am under the impression evolutionist belief is that we took our current form or whatever like a million years ago.
Nope. Our current form is only about 150,000 years old.
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And it took until the past couple thousand for advancements like building shelters, then towns, and governing towns, and boats, and traveling and starting new countries and technology.
Sorry. That is the way it is.
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Why is it if the world is so old, that almost everything has happen just in the recent thousands of years?
Very little has happened in the last few thousands of years. Things that you value are recent, but that hardly counts as 'almost everything.'
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But it seems hard to believe that for hundreds of thousands of years, there wasn't much going on other than just layin around in the jungle not doing much of anything to advance life/technology/whatever.
Do you also have a hard time believing that there are STILL cultures just like this? There is no rule demanding that people build sky-scrapers.
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