Originally published February 23 2006
Chimps more like humans than apes, research shows
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
New research suggests chimpanzees are more closely related to humans that to any other species of the great apes classification they belong to, and chimps are evolving about 3 percent more quickly than humans.
While you might think of yourself as smarter than the average ape, beware: Those distant relatives of ours have a knack for evolving more quickly than we do.
And by revealing this through DNA analysis, scientists have provided support for a controversial hypothesis that chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than to other species of great apes with which they're currently classified.
Researchers generally agree that humans and chimps diverged from a common ancestor about 5 million to 7 million years ago.
Our clock began to slow down about 1 million years ago, and today it is 3 percent slower than that of the chimp and 11 percent slower than in the gorilla, concludes the study, led by Soojin Yi, a biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
This slower clock correlates with a longer time needed to reach sexual maturity --- almost twice as long for humans as gorillas.
In order for mutations to cause lasting change in a species, they must pass on to the next generation.
"A long generation time is an important trait that separates humans from their evolutionary relatives," said Navin Elango, a graduate student working with Yi.
"I think we can say that this study provides further support for the hypothesis that humans and chimpanzees should be in one genus, rather than two different genus' because we not only share extremely similar genomes, we share similar generation time," Yi said.
"Mutations that are advantageous to the human, such as intelligence, probably are under strong natural selection," meaning individuals either latch on to the good stuff or perish.
However, Yi and her colleagues looked only at mutations in non-functional regions of DNA, changes that don't affect evolution.
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