So if we really did evolve from apes...why are apes still roaming earth? 8)

Evolution is not as you construe, your family tree is not a straight line and neither is the familial lines between primates and humans.  This image gives a fairly good intuition on how it works:Basically we share an ancestor with the great apes, you can think of them as cousins or siblings with a common "parent", they evolved to deal with the changes of their environment in a different way than the sapient line (our line) did.  We still find extinct leftovers from the early sapients, the Neanderthals being a common example, they died out likely because they were poorly suited to the Earth's environment post ice age.