AARHUS, Denmark, Jan. 26 (UPI) -- Though chimpanzees are our closest relatives, humans have some genes more like those of a more distant kin, the orangutan, Danish researchers say.
Researchers Mikkel Schierup and Thomas Mailund of Aarhus University in Denmark set out to examine the genetic variation present in common primate ancestor species, an article in the journal Genome Research reported.
With the addition of the orangutan to the collection of sequenced primate genomes, they examined the DNA sequences contained in them.
"There remains signals of the distant past in DNA," Mailund said, "and our approach is to use such signals to study the genetics of our ancestors."
Mailund and his colleagues looked for regions of the orangutan genome where humans and orangutans are more closely related than humans and chimpanzees.
"[I]n about 0.5 percent of our genome, we are (more closely) related to orangutans than we are to chimpanzees," Mailund said, "and in about 0.5 percent, chimpanzees are (more closely) related to orangutans than us."
Because humans and orangutans split millions of years prior to the human/chimp split, Schierup said, that suggests the ancestral species of human and chimps maintained high genetic diversity, in contrast to the genetic bottleneck humans are believed to have experienced following our divergence from chimps.
