Gorilla Genome Explains Evolution of Apes

Scientists from Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in United Kingdom cracked the full genome of Kamila, a 35-year old gorilla in San Diego, California. The genome of the gorilla was compared with the genomes of other closest relatives of humans such as chimpanzees and orangutans.

The resulting data suggest that gorillas split from their common ancestor with humans and chimps about 10 million years ago, and that chimps and humans split from each other about 4 million years after that. This explains a lot about the evolutionary puzzle of the three types of great ape. "For a long time there was discordance between the fossil evidence and genetic estimates, in the sense that genetic estimates came up with speciation times that were more recent," says Aylwyn Scally, one of the researchers.

Read more of the story at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gorilla-joins-the-genome-club.