• Question: what is the closest thing related to a human

    Asked by to Claire, Ian, Sergey, Vicky, Zena on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Sergey Lamzin

      Sergey Lamzin answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      There is a reason why your parents call you a pig when you don’t clean the toilet after yourself.
      Purely based on gene similarity the most similar life form to us are pigs.

      But in the end of the day who knows. We may all be aliens.

    • Photo: Vicky Schneider

      Vicky Schneider answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      primates 🙂 (not pigs)

    • Photo: Ian Simpson

      Ian Simpson answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      The closest living related organism is in the Pan family, so for example the Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) or Bonobo (Pan paniscus).

      This is worked out by studying the rate and nature of sequence changes in proteins between humans and other organisms using a process called “Molecular phylogenetics”. This involves applying some very complex mathematical models of sequence changes and working out which organisation of the “Tree of Life” best explains those changes. It is a field not without controversy, but as far as humans are concerned it’s been settled for some time.

      There’s a very nice interactive tree of life available from the Natural History Museum which you can play with here :-

      http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/evolution/tree-of-life/interactive-tree/

    • Photo: Claire Shooter

      Claire Shooter answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      The closest non-living thing was Neanderthals who we were so closely related to we could breed with them. A lot of the human geneome has neanderthal origins from this interbreeding. Sadly, they died out thousands of years ago and now our closest relatives are primates

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