What makes us different from the great apes?
Traditional primate classifications places humans as the sole living members of the family Hominidae and the African great apes (gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos i.e. pygmy chimpanzees) are placed together with Asian great apes (orangutans) within the subfamily Ponginae of the family Pongidae. However, this anthropocentric view has been strongly challenged by overwhelming evidence that the African great apes share their more recent common ancestry with humans than with orangutans (see Goodman, 1999). Nucleotide sequence data indicate that divergence of human-chimpanzee, human-gorilla and human-orangutan lineages occurred about 5.5, 6.7 and 8.2 million years ago respectively (Kumar and Hedges, 1998), and humans are now thought to be particularly closely related to chimpanzees and bonobos (Goodman et al., 1998). The divergence into separate species may initially have been driven by small cytogenetic differences and/or mutations in key genes regulating gamete formation or regulation of e
