I took "basic biology" in high school where we were, in fact, informed rather unambiguously that "man is in the ape family". That is pretty obvious -- we're not in the horsefly or crocodile family. Again you're taking a condescending attitude toward me even after I have repeatedly admitted my layman status and I don't know why. It is completely uncalled for.
Anyway, I'm assuming the obvious, that there were apes before there were humans. Therefore, we must have evolved from one of these ape species, correct?
I'm just a layman asking an expert like you (or anyone else in here who wants to field the question) how we got from this ape -- or whatever primate is supposed to be the ancestor of the human race -- to humans, without there still being in existence any successful species that is a descendant of this primate but still an ancestor of homo sapiens. Maybe I'm wrong but I can't help thinking there must have been a bunch of such mutations that were successful at least long enough to hand the baton to the next successful mutation, and if that many mutations could have survived that long, then the chances of long-term survival -- e.g., for at least one of these species making it to the present day -- would seem to be pretty good. Not a sure thing, mind you, but maybe a better than even chance.
You are not "on trial", this is not a rhetorical question designed to trap you. You may very well have a cogent, plausible answer but so far you refuse to give one. It just doesn't seem to me such a difficult question to answer, and I'm sorry, but "Go look it up on this or that website, you stupid member of the great unwashed" does not qualify as an answer.
So since you are either unwilling or unable to give such an answer, I'll give what I would consider some plausible answers for you:
1) Mr. Zhang, successful mutations don't run on any sort of set clockwork schedule. Averages are just that, averages. You might have a half-dozen successful mutations pop up in a span of 5 minutes and not have another one for 2 million years. That nothing has popped up in the last x-hundred thousand years only means we are probably in just such a 'dry spell'.
2) Mr. Zhang, there is no evidence that there were anywhere near 100 successful mutations from the ape that was the direct ancestor of homo sapiens. Fossil evidence shows that there were at most 3 or 4, which over the span of 7+ million years, means it will probably be another million or 2 million years after the appearance of homo sapiens before the next one. It also means that the credibility of the hypothesis that all other hominids/humanoids/whatever were wiped out by homo sapiens is very high, because there were so few of them.
3) Mr. Zhang, fossil evidence shows there were in fact a lot of successful mutations, as you have suggested, between the early apes and homo sapiens. We know or at least have ideas supported by the availabe evidence about why many of them did not survive to the present, but we don't know why NONE of them did. But then again, none of the giant dinosaur species made it to the present time either, so while it may seem unlikely, there is an obvious precedent in nature (dinosaurs) that shows such an event to be far from impossible or even improbable.
4) Mr. Zhang (fill in succinct answer here):
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How'm I doin'?
"Anyway, I'm assuming the obvious, that there were apes before there were humans. Therefore, we must have evolved from one of these ape species, correct?"
No. Apes are humans so we couldn't evolve from them. Evolution is not a straight line, it is a tree or bush. But we came from a common ancestor, all the great apes and diverged along different branches, some of them ending in extinction.
Here is a list of relatively close ancestors of apes and humans:
Starting some 80 million years ago:
Tree shrews, Lemurs Lorises Tarsiers Cebids Old World Monkeys
Gibbons Oranutan Gorilla Human Chimps
Chimps branched off after Humans started evolving from the common ancestor of humans and chimps about 7.7 million years ago. Chimps branched about 3.4 million years ago.
Anthropoids branced from ancestral primates about 70 million years ago and apes as a whole about 23 million years ago.
What you have to understand about genetics is that mutations and other content changes in genetic material build up whether expressed in the phenotype or not. Thus, there are many areas of genetic material that can be activated by various type of switch type genes. So if life has been evolving for a billion years, we have a billion years of genetic variations throught the whole system.