But they're less closely related to each other than humans are to chimps. These European birds share 97.7 percent of the same DNA and look virtually identical. Take the willow warblers and the chiffchaffs as an example. They conceive of not one but three separate species within the Homo genus: Homo troglodytes, the common chimpanzee Homo paniscus, the bonobo and us, Homo sapiens.īeing in the same genus means the species are very closely related, so much so that sometimes they might be distinguishable only to experts. Using this method, humans and chimps are part of not only the same family, but even the same genus. However, one school of taxonomy – known as the cladistics – arranges species based on relative genetic distance. In most encyclopedias, you'll find humans and chimpanzees classed in the same order, the Primates, and the same superfamily, the Hominoidea, but in separate families: the Hominidae for humans and Pongidae for chimpanzees. In fact, we're so genetically close to chimps that some scientists even consider us part of the same family. Of that percentage, only a small amount contains the genetic tools that helped us develop those attributes we consider uniquely human, such as language, art and technology. We share 96.4 percent of our genes with orangutans, 97.7 percent with gorillas and an incredible 98.6 percent with chimpanzees.Įffectively, that means that a mere 1.4 percent of our DNA distinguishes us from chimpanzees. Scientists are now able to look at the human genome and calculate exactly how alike humans and apes are. But exactly how genetically similar are we to our wild cousins, and which ones are our closest relatives? The similarities between humans and other primates aren’t hard to spot.

The third chimpanzee by jared diamond