Molecular evidense suggests that our common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between 5 and 7 million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards.

We admit that we are like , but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas is much more recent than their common ancestor with the Asian apes — the and orangutans. There is no natural category that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans but excludes humans.

Put another way, the chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans.

If we look at certain proteins, yes, man then -- it can be assumed that man is more closely related to a chimpanzee than other things. But on the other hand, if you look at other certain proteins, you'll find that man is more closely related to a bullfrog than he is a chimpanzee. If you focus your attention on other proteins, you'll find that man is more closely related to a chicken than he is to a chimpanzee." (Gish has repeatedly been challenged to support this claim, but has failed to do so: **Source)

Imagine that we didn't know the chimpanzee, that all we knew were those bonobos who have sex all the time and are peaceful and female-dominated and that people would say that this is our only close relative. I think we would have totally different theories about ourselves and our background. But, of course, it didn't happen that way.

If we go far enough back, any two people on Earth have a common ancestor.

"All modern humans are related to what scientists call "Mitochondrial Eve." This refers to our common matrilineal ancestor. She lived approximately 200,000 years ago and depending on how you estimate the length of a generation, we are only 5,000 to 10,000 generations from one another. To put it another way, each of us is a cousin of one another at most 10,000 times removed. And yes, Mitochondrial Eve lived in Africa, so, in a very real way, we are all Africans."

We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia... Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today.

There has been little morphological evidence offered since Darwin in support of the relatedness of humans and one or both of the African apes, but that, when the relationships among the extant humanoids are investigated cladistically in an evaluation of more than 200 morphological features, there are well over twice as many morphological synapomorphies in support of uniting humans with the orang-utan as with the African ape clad and very few in support of uniting the chimpanzee more closely with humans than with the gorilla.

It’s hard to notice dogs that don’t bark, so let me belabor this point a bit. You don’t see Harvard geneticist David Reich announcing that, say, unbeknownst to all previous observers, it turns out that the closest living relations to Samoans are actually Mohawks and Basques, while Tongans are most closely linked to Inuit, Samaritans, and Khoisan. Instead, what is found over and over is that the old anthropologists going all the way back to Linnaeus and Blumenbach in the 18th century tended to arrive at fairly reasonable frameworks for how the human races’ ancestral diversity could be conceptually organized. Lately, there have been interesting discoveries about the deep history of current populations, but few if any shockers about today’s races. Why? Because what we can see is the product of the genes we can’t see. So the arrival of genome sequencing primarily just confirmed what sharp-eyed observers had already noticed about who is related to whom.

Paleontologists do not have to search for famous "missing link" from which humans supposedly came, and current great apes. This link is simply the socialist - because he has both monkey genes.

More poignant for us, at Laetoli in Tanzania are the companionable footprints of three real hominids, probably Australopithecus afarensis, walking together 3.6 million years ago in what was then fresh volcanic ash. Who does not wonder what these individuals were to each other, whether they held hands or even talked, and what forgotten errand they shared in a Pliocene dawn?

Until fairly recently it was thought that humans had
fortv-eight chromosomes in an ordinary somatic cell. We now know that the correct number is forty-six. Chimps apparently really do have forty-eight chromosomes, and in this case a viable cross of a chimpanzee and a human would in any event be rare.

Is it on your grandmother’s or grandfather’s side that you are descended from an ape?