First full set of great ape genome sequenced

“If we want to understand the genetic diversity of humans,we need to measure the genetic diversity of our nearest relatives,” said study researcher Tomas Marques-Bonet,a geneticist at the Institute de Biologia Evolutiva in Spain. The genetic history of chimpanzees turned out to be much more complex than that of humans. Compared with chimps,”it looks like our (humans’) history has been really simple,” Marques-Bonet said.

Marques-Bonet said human populations encountered a bottleneck when they left Africa,and have since expanded to colonise the whole planet. By contrast,chimpanzee populations have undergone at least two to three bottlenecks and expansions.

Researchers said the findings also settle a hot debate over the relationships among the four chimpanzee subspecies Central chimpanzee,Western chimpanzee,Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee and Eastern chimpanzee. “Now,we have the full genome for all four,” Marques-Bonet said.

Rather than revealing four groups,the sequences show that all chimps divide into two major groups: a Nigeria Cameroon /Western population and a Central/Eastern population.

The new findings don’t change humans’ position in the great-ape evolutionary tree.

Chimpanzees and bonobos remain humans’ closest living relatives,splitting off from humanity about 5 million years ago,researchers said. Humans’ next-closest living relatives are gorillas,and orangutans are the most distantly related of the great apes.