Chimpanzees, you are not alone. The distinction of being our closest living relative in the animal kingdom is now a tie with the bonobo.
An international team of researchers has sequenced the genome of the bonobo for the first time, confirming that it shares the same percentage of its DNA (about 99.6%) with us as chimps do.
There are obviously key differences in the genomes of the three species and those differences are why bonobos and chimpanzees don't look or act like us even though we all share 99% plus of the same DNA. While we share the same total amount, about 1.6% is shared with only the bonobo, but not chimpanzees - and we share about the same amount of our DNA with only chimps, but not bonobos.
These differences suggest that the ancestral population of apes that gave rise to humans, chimps, and bonobos was quite large and diverse genetically—numbering about 27,000 breeding individuals. Once the ancestors of humans split from this population more than 5 million years ago, the common ancestor of bonobos and chimps retained this diversity until their population completely split into two groups 1 million years ago.The groups that evolved into bonobos, chimps, and humans all retained slightly different subsets of this ancestral population's diverse gene pool—and those differences now offer clues today to the size and range of diversity in that ancestral group.
Bonobos Join Chimps as Closest Human Relatives by Ann Gibbons, Science
