Evolutionary Relationship Between Chimpanzee And Bonobo

The chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and the bonobo (Pan paniscus) are the two closest living relatives of humans. While, bonobos and chimpanzees are very similar to each other, they also differ in many significant ways. However, in some ways they resemble more closely to humans than to each other. For example, chimpanzee males are much more aggressive and violent, especially when competing for a mate or a rank within the group. This violence can be lethal. In their communities, male to male bonds are very important. On the opposite side, bonobo males are much more friendly and playful, and there is no evidence of lethal aggression among them. In their communities, mother to son and female to female bonds are very important. This reflects how bonobos …show more content…
Thus, they sequenced and assembled genome of a female bonobo named Ulindi. Then, they compared it to genomes of chimpanzees and humans. They found that bonobos and chimpanzees share 99.6% of DNA, and bonobos and humans share 98.7% of DNA, which is close to percent of DNA chimpanzees share with humans, which is also about 99%. Researchers compared genomes of two chimpanzees, bonobo, and human to test for number of shared derived alleles. They found no significant difference in number of shared derived alleles. This agrees with proposition that when Congo River formed around 2 million years ago, it created a gene flow barrier between bonobos and chimpanzees. Prior to this study, there was an estimate that less than 1% of the human genome is more closely related to either one of the genomes of two apes, than those two genomes are to each other. In order to test this, they used bonobo genome and a coalescent Markov model (HMM) approach. They found that 1.6% percent of the human genome is more closely related to bonobo genome than to chimpanzee genome. They, also, found that 1.7% of the human genome is more closely related to chimpanzee genome than to bonobo