Speciation of Humans and The African Apes
The separation of humans from their closest relatives, the African apes (chimpanzees and gorillas), has been studied extensively for more than a century. Five major questions have been addressed:
- Which apes are our closest ancestors?
- When did the separations occur?
- What was the effective population size of the common ancestor before the split?
- Are there traces of population structure (subpopulations) preceding the speciation or partial admixture succeeding it?
- What were the specific events (including fusion of chromosomes 2a and 2b) prior to and subsequent to the separation?
Read more about this topic: Human Evolutionary Genetics
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