Why are there no species that have developed to bridge the gap between humans and apes?
In: Biology
When two species inhabit the same ecological niche, and compete for the same resources, in the long term only one can survive. The weaker one either moves to another niche or dies out.
The same happened with all the Home genus that existed between us and that common ancestor. The ape-side of the tree moved into a niche the homo-side didn’t want and survived, but the homo variants competed for the same niche.
It is a fair assumption knowing how we operate nowadays, but still only an assumption, to say that that competition for resources involved annihilation by force. The time span we’re talking about here is long enough that non-violent takeovers (i.e. having more and stronger people leads to monopolization of resources) would also have done the trick.
In addition, many of the branches would have been able to cross-breed and would have disappeared that way. Breed in enough of what would turn out to be the branch leading to Homo Sapiens and the other branch vanishes. (BTW We found a couple of gene pools in modern humans that proof that even Homo Sapiens picked up some closely related branches in certain regions.)
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