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| Bonobo (Pan paniscus) |
It has long been said that chimpanzees are our closest relatives, but now chimpanzees are no longer the sole masters of the title.An international research team has sequenced Bonobo's genome for the first time. They confirmed that bonobos and chimpanzees have exactly the same proportions of DNA as humans. The team also found some more exciting small differences in the genomes of these three species to understand why these three species differ from each other. Which, of course, made the video an overnight sensation.
"We're genetically very close, but we still behave differently," said Janet Kelso, a member of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. And that's exactly what will allow us to look at the genetic basis of why chimpanzees and bonobos are so different from us. "
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| Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) |
Since 2005, when scientists sequenced the genome, they found that chimpanzees have about 99% DNA similarity to humans, making them the closest species to humans. However, there are actually two species of apes that closely resemble humans. One of them is the common pan troglodytes and the other is the panoiscus. What exactly did the ancestors of man look like? Whether they looked like bonobos or chimpanzees or had behavioral similarities with them, the study showed hope in the researchers' observations.