• Question: if you compare a human and a ape what do you get

    Asked by 268brna22 to Ciarán on 17 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Ciarán O'Brien

      Ciarán O'Brien answered on 17 Nov 2014:


      Not a whole lot, actually. Apes are really surprisingly similar to humans. about 96% of our DNA is exactly the same!

      The 4% of our DNA that’s different makes some very interesting changes though. Our brains are bigger and more folded in on themselves (we’re cramming an awful lot of brain into our little skulls!), we aren’t as hairy, the muscles in our faces are a bit more complicated but our feet are useless at grabbing things.

      It’s probably the differences in our brains that cause most of the differences we see. For whatever reason we seem to think a lot more about abstract stuff. We can have a thought, and then we can think about why we had that thought, and think about how we’re thinking about why we had that thought, and so on. Apes don’t seem to bother with all of that deep philosophical stuff, and I suspect they’re a lot happier because of it!

      We still have a lot in common though. We’re both very social animals and gather together in groups to say safe and help each other out, we both have little societies with rules (although humans make their rules much more complicated). We both love to play games and lunge around eating tasty fruit…

      The gut bacteria in apes would look fairly similar to humans, too. there’d be differences, sure, because apes live outdoors and don’t eat cooked or processed food, but I bet it would be quite hard to tell from a poop sample whether you were looking at human poo or ape poo.

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