Recent Studies of Primates as our Nearest Relatives

RECENT STUDIES OF PRIMATES AS OUR NEAREST RELATIVES
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Charles Darwin in the late 1800s already surmised similarities between African apes and humans, but it was only recently when we understood how evolutionary close we truly were. In a recent publication by the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium (Spencer 2012) showed that we share 96% of our DNA sequence with chimpanzees, making our closest living relative. Meanwhile, Scientific American in a "sequencing of the gorilla, chimpanzee and bonobo genomes confirms that...chimps and bonobos...[are] our nearest living relatives, sharing approximately 99 percent of our DNA, with gorillas training at 98 percent" (Wong 2014). Physically, however, there is no indication of our similarity to chimps and apes. The small unshared DNA has led to a world of difference: it has given us bipedalism, an enlarged brain, and the capacity for complex languages. What then do we have in common? Jane Goodall for one, says: a lot.
Then only 26 years old, Jane Goodall was the first to collect indepth information about chimpanzees and their behaviors. Studying about these primates for 30 years enabled Goodall to witness and record individual chimps and ultimately, show us what it meant to share more than 90% of our DNA with another living being. For example, Dr. Goodall (2015) found out that chimps became sexually mature by age 10 to 13 - around the same age humans experience puberty. Moreover, the length of pregnancy lasted for 8 months - a mere one month short of the usual human gestation period. In 1982, Linda Fedigan's study looked at female primates further and discovered that just like humans, primates engage in promiscuous sexual behavior but would typically mate only with a male of her group (121). Moreover, it was also discovered that females experienced a period of ovulation when she could get pregnant.
Meanwhie studies also showed that like humans, chimps have a long childhood, and they form long-term bonds with their mothers and siblings. Both human children and young chimps show an "insatiable appetite for play, are extremely cautious, learn through observation and imitation, need constant reassurance and attention, and finally, need affectionate physical contact for healthy development" (Goodall 2015). Like humans, chimps seem to have the capacity to pass on certain behaviors across generations (Goodall 1990:20, Gardner et al 1969), a phenomenon many researchers say is the beginning of culture.
In terms of anatomy, research shows that brain and central nervous systems of chimps and humans are startlingly similar (Goodall 2015). Hence, it is no surprise that apes (chimps, gorillas, and bonobos) share a number of intellectual capacities previously thought to have been uniquely human. For example, it was discovered that they are capable of creating sophisticated tools (Goodall 1990: 22), and are able to use cooperation when hunting. Their capacity for generalization and symbolic representation has enabled some chimps to learn sign language (Gardner 1969, Terrace 2011), though limited to communicating about their basic needs. In Herbert Terrace's study (2011), he discovered that "Nim [the subject chimp] could indeed create grammatical sentences ...