er... nobody believes that human beings evolved from monkeys. humans didn't evolve from monkeys anymore than monkeys evolved from cats or rats or beings from the planet zog.

evolution by natural selection lisences the claim that human beings and monkeys have a COMMON ANCESTOR.

this is why it is important that evolution by natural selection is taught properly and not watered down by theological / philosophical / historical discussions...

the notion you are talking about sounds like the 'clan of the cavebear' stuff that was popular in the 60's. works well for a novel and was loosely based on a CONTROVESIAL theory at the time.

one misconception of evolution by natural selection is the notion that some organisms are more evolved than others. like fish are working hard to evolve into land based mammals and monkeys are working hard to evolve into people. that simply isn't the case. every member of every presently existing species has been evolving for as long as any other member of every presently existing species. take human beings out of their ecological niche and i can assure you we behave just as stupidly as when you take bacteria or dogs or rats or monkeys out of their ecological niche...

I'm not quite sure what is meant by 'caveman' but I guess the notion (that would have been endorsed by some anthropologists back in the 60's at least) was that 'caveman' was a distinct lineage from the lineage that evolved into homo sapiens. The notion would still be that 'cavemen' and homo sapiens had a common ancestor, however (and the common ancestor isn't thought to be the present day monkey or ape it is thought to be the ANCESTOR of the present day monkey or ape). all of life is thought to have a common ancestor. why? because that makes the best sense of certain features of living organisms that are contingent (in the sense of arbitrary / could easily have been otherwise but isn't in fact otherwise) and yet universal for life on our planet such as the fact that G binds to C and T binds to A and so on and so forth...