Humans More Related To Orangutans Than Chimps, Study Suggests

Humans More Related To Orangutans Than Chimps, Study Suggests

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Jeffrey H. Schwartz, professor of anthropology in Pitt's School of Arts and Sciences and president of the World Academy of Art and Science, and John Grehan, director of science at the Buffalo Museum, conducted a detailed analysis of the physical features of living and fossil apes that suggested humans, orangutans, and early apes belong to a group separate from chimpanzees and gorillas. They then constructed a scenario for how the human-orangutan common ancestor migrated between Southeast Asiawhere modern orangutans are fromand other parts of the world and evolved into now-extinct apes and early humans.

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Schwartz and Grehan scrutinized the hundreds of physical characteristics often cited as evidence of evolutionary relationships among humans and other great apeschimps, gorillas, and orangutansand selected 63 that could be verified as unique within this group (i.e., they do not appear in other primates). Of these features, the analysis found that humans shared 28 unique physical characteristics with orangutans, compared to only two features with chimpanzees, seven with gorillas, and seven with all three apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans). Gorillas and chimpanzees shared 11 unique characteristics.

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Schwartz and Grehan contend in the Journal of Biogeography that the clear physical similarities between humans and orangutans have long been overshadowed by molecular analyses that link humans to chimpanzees, but that those molecular comparisons are often flawed: There is no theory holding that molecular similarity necessarily implies an evolutionary relationship; molecular studies often exclude orangutans and focus on a limited selection of primates without an adequate "outgroup" for comparison; and molecular data that contradict the idea that genetic similarity denotes relation are often dismissed.

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We have many intuitions in our life and the point is that many of these intuitions are wrong. The question is, are we going to test those intuitions?
-Dan Ariely

Agreed. I put this up more because I was pretty shocked that they would disregard the molecular data so off hand. I didn't really find the article too convincing, I just thought it was interesting the press it was getting. I'll take a look at that blog post, though

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We have many intuitions in our life and the point is that many of these intuitions are wrong. The question is, are we going to test those intuitions?
-Dan Ariely