Ghost of genetics past shows up in bonobos (http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/dn13734-ghost-of-genetics-past-shows-up-in-bonobos.html?feedId=online-news_rss20)

The genomes of our nearest kin, chimpanzees and bonobos, are strewn with anomalies where the usual patterns of relatedness break down. These aberrant regions may offer a rare peek into one of the most mysterious periods in our own evolutionary history: the period around 5.4 million years ago when early humans diverged from their chimp-like ancestors.

Chimps and bonobos are each other's closest relatives, having split from a common ancestor only about 1.3 million years ago. Humans are their next closest cousins, having branched off about 4 million years earlier.

But when David Reich, a population geneticist at the Broad Institute in Boston, and his colleagues sequenced tens of thousands of random snippets of DNA from bonobos and chimps, then compared these to the matching sequences of the complete chimp and human genomes, they found a surprise. In 453 of their sequences, either bonobos or chimps proved to be more closely related to humans than to each other.

Common ancestor

The most likely explanation is that the common ancestor of the three species carried at least two variants of each of these genes. Over time, chimps ended up inheriting one of these variants and bonobos the other, and one of them matched the variant inherited by humans.

I was reading this article and I wondered. Of sciforum members how many people accept that humans, chimps and bonobos evolved from a common ancestor?

Of sciforum members how many people accept that humans, chimps and bonobos evolved from a common ancestor?

Are you conducting a poll?

everyone shares a common ancestor

everyone shares a common ancestor


If you accept the Big Bang theory as true.

Even if you don't.

I was just wondering if most people here accept the FACT that we share a common ancestor

I was just wondering if most people here accept the FACT that we share a common ancestor

well how in the world can we not share the same common ancestor?

we all evolved from the big bang. subtle physical reactions leading to the creation of atoms, atoms reacting to form molecules, molecules reacting to form cells, cells evolving into organisms and eventually into all that we see around us. why must we categorise everything around us on an arbirtary point in time? why not just accept all as it is, was, and will be again in the infinite cycle of the universe?

Even if you don't.


A Steady State cosmos wouldn't demand convergence.
well how in the world can we not share the same common ancestor?

If life arose en masse across the world?

This seems likely, logically speaking the conditions for its appearance would have been met simultaneously, in many different places.