Tracing exactly when these lineages diverged, however, is tricky. Primatologists know from fossils that humans, chimps, and gorillas shared an ancient ancestor. "Although of the human genome is indeed closer to chimpanzees, on average, a sizable minority of 15 percent is in fact closer to gorillas, and another 15 percent is where chimpanzees and gorillas are closest," said geneticist Aylwyn Scally, a study co-author also at the Wellcome Trust. (See "New Ape May Be Human-Gorilla Ancestor.")īut Durbin and a team of 70 other researchers didn't stop with a family tree comparison. The team also detected groups of gorilla genes that were surprisingly similar to human genes. "Based on the comparisons between them, it helps us explore the evolutionary origins of humans and where we separated from other great ape species in Africa between six and ten million years ago," Durbin said. So we now have a complete picture," said study co-author Richard Durbin, a geneticist with the U.K.'s Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. probably one percent of the whole genome. "Previously, people had some sort of picture based on. In 2008 geneticists took DNA from Kamilah, a then 30-year-old female western lowland gorilla from the San Diego Zoo.įour years later the team published the species' genome, which completes a basic genetic library of the great apes-a branch of primates including people, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. Staring face to face with a gorilla, it's hard not to find them eerily similar to humans-and now the first published gorilla genome supports that, according to a new study.
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