From what I've heard, in the original Hebrew of the Old Testament, the actual wording is a period of time, but that was translated to a "day."
As to the rest of it. I am personally wary of evolution, and that's not because I'm religious but because I'm logical. I can see the earliest beginnings where the primordial soup formed the basics of life, and I can see the very end where evolution and natural selection are making subtle changes in species. However, I can't for the life of me see the middle.
If you think about it, once you get even only to the first single-celled creatures, hardly any mutations will be beneficial. The chances are probably in the range of one out of a billion or so. That would mean you need billions of one species for a few to have beneficial mutations. Then the mutants have to be able to survive long enough to make a billion more of their kind, with many more, probably detrimental mutations getting in the way. While getting to the proper numbers probably wouldn't be a problem in the bacterial world, there is still a lot going against even them probability-wise.
If you look deeper into the probabilities, you will realize that for every beneficial mutation, there will be millions of other mutations, most of them detrimental. The only way greater organization can come out of that is with incredibly large numbers. Again, this isn't much of a problem for bacteria, but when you carry this over to the multi-cellular world, I see major problems.
Today we're worried about the genomes of species, including ourselves, degrading rather than continuing to evolve, for the same reasons that I just mentioned. So how could species have evolved so far up to this point, but only just now have genomic problems? I know some of it has to do with the lack of natural selection, especially in humans and agricultural breeds, but in no way does that cover all of it. The only solution I can come up with is divine intervention. Without it, I can't see any hope for complex life.
So to get back to your theory, I believe all the species we're created by God through evolution. I don't think significant complexity-building evolution is possible without God. Some species may have evolved on their own, but from my observations, none of them are more complex than their ancestors. So maybe there was one race of mankind that other species diverged from, or maybe primitive man-like beings did evolve from apes, but I can't see equals to humans being the offspring of pure evolution.