Scientists didn't need to wait for the chimp genome to beginspeculating about the essential differences between humans and apes,of course. They didn't even need to know about DNA. Much of thevitriol directed at Charles Darwin a century and a half ago came notfrom his ideas about evolution in general but from his insulting butlogical implication that humans and the African apes are descendedfrom a common ancestor.

As paleontologists have accumulated more and more fossils, they havecompiled data on a long list of anatomical features, including bodyshape, bipedalism, brain size, the shape of the skull and face, thesize of canine teeth, and opposable thumbs. Using comparativeanalyses of these attributes, along with dating that shows whenvarious features appeared or vanished, they have constructedincreasingly elaborate family trees that show the relationshipsbetween apes, ancient hominids and us. Along the way they learned,among other things, that Darwin, even with next to no actual data,was close to being right in his intuition that apes and humans aredescended from a single common ancestor-and, surprisingly, that theability to walk upright emerged millions of years before theevolution of our big brains.

But it wasn't until the 1960s that details of our physicalrelationship to the apes started to be understood at the level ofbasic biochemistry. Wayne State University scientist Morris Goodmanshowed, for example, that injecting a chicken with a particular bloodprotein from a human, a gorilla or a chimp provoked a specific immuneresponse, whereas proteins from orangutans and gibbons produced noresponse at all. And by 1975, the then new science of moleculargenetics had led to a landmark paper by two University of California,Berkeley, scientists, Mary-Claire King and Allan Wilson, estimatingthat chimps and humans share between 98% and 99% of their geneticmaterial.

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