Are Humans -- Great Apes

That picture is pretty cool once it loads. But you know how they say a picture is worth a thousand words–well I think this one contains a thousand words.

The whole chimapnzee thing just got a bit more complicated.

IIRC, we’re having to readjust a lot of our groupings of species as more genetic information becomes available. Before it’s done we’ll probably find out that humans are really descended from chickens or something. :wink:

That seems unlikely: it’s more likely that they will find that our ancestral line diverged from the chimps a million or so years earlier or later than currently believed. Our ancestors and the chicken’s ancestors both lived at a time when the chicken’s ancestors were non-avian dinosaurs and ours were non-primate mammals.

Just in case anyone’s interested in the actual paper, it’s scheduled to appear in the journal Genetics in November:

Hahn, Matthew W., Jeffery P. Demuth and Sang-Gook Han
Accelerated rate of gene gain and loss in primates

Note also that while the overall genetic differences between humans and chimps may actually be higher than previously stated, it won’t necessarily change any phylogenetic relationships between or among groups. We are still likely to be more closely related to chimps than to gorillas, etc., and chimps and humans are likely still going to be one another’s closest relatives.

Uh, the :wink: should have indicated that I was making a joke about the chicken thing.