Debating Our Closest Cousins

Scientists Jeffrey Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania and John Grehan of the Buffalo Museum of Science in New York recently published a paper that give the human evolutionary branch and its neighbors a good shake-up. The new research suggests that humans are more closely related to orang-utans than they are to chimpanzees and in doing so flies in the face what has for some time been a well-accepted phylogenetic arrangement.