Did humans evolve from chimpanzees?

Humans did not evolve from chimpanzees. Chimpanzees and bonobos are our closest living relatives, but the two lineages split from a common ancestor and have followed their own paths ever since. That ancestor was neither a chimpanzee nor a human. Humans are not descended from any primate living today. [1] [2]

The Smithsonian's Human Origins Program places the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees between 8 and 6 million years ago. Becoming Human gives a slightly earlier range of 8 to 7 million years ago. The National Center for Science Education describes this ancestor as a group of populations rather than a single individual. One population evolved over many generations into modern chimpanzees and bonobos, and another into the hominins, including Homo sapiens. [3] [4] [5]

This also answers the common objection that chimpanzees should not exist if humans evolved. Lineages usually split rather than simply turning one into another, and the consensus among evolutionary scientists is that splitting has been by far the more important pattern in the history of life. Both humans and chimpanzees are descendants of the ancestor, so neither replaced the other. [5]

According to the Smithsonian, human and chimpanzee DNA differ by about 1.2 percent when only substitutions in shared genes are counted. Bonobos differ from humans by the same amount, gorillas by about 1.6 percent, and orangutans by about 3.1 percent. Rhesus monkeys differ from humans and the great apes by about 7 percent. Counting deleted, duplicated and inserted segments adds a further 4 to 5 percent difference between the human and chimpanzee genomes. Whichever method is used, humans, chimpanzees and bonobos are more closely related to one another than to gorillas or any other primate. [3]

Humans are apes, not descendants of monkeys. All apes and monkeys share a more distant ancestor from about 25 million years ago. [1] [5]

What the human-chimpanzee ancestor looked like is less settled. Authors cited by the National Center for Science Education suggest it probably resembled modern chimpanzees more than modern humans in features such as brain size, prominent canines and a projecting jaw. Becoming Human notes that there is a lot of debate about how closely it resembled a modern chimpanzee. Neither lineage is more evolved than the other. Both have changed since the split, though certain kinds of change, especially in gene regulation and in the brain, have occurred more often on the human side. [5] [4]