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How closely related are humans and chimpanzees?

This questions is often considered solved as it has been established in the course of the chimpanzee genome project that we share more than 95% of our genes with chimpanzees. However, there is growing evidence that this is not the full story. A study recently published in PLoS ONE illustrates that “untrained chimpanzees fail to imitate novel actions”. In short, the authors claim that every chimpanzee needs to re-invent the wheel on its own while humans copy whole behaviors, i.e., the details of the cultural design, including fine-tuned actions, goals and results.

Contradicting the majority opinion, this study at first faced some problems to get published, but as it often happens with negative results, it has attracted considerable attention since it finally got published.

Thomas Jagau

Read more: C. Tennie, J. Call , M. Tomasello, PLoS ONE 7(8) 2012, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0041548