When it comes to closest living relatives in the animal kingdom, chimpanzees and bonobos top the list. They share a common ancestor and over 98% of our DNA. Both species belong to the genus Pan.

While laughter is often considered uniquely human, tied to language and sense of humor, all great apes produce remarkably ...

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, as well as Rocky Vista University (U.S.), show that ...

Navigating the terminology of “ape,” “great ape,” “monkey,” “primate,” and “gorilla” can be confusing, as each term refers to ...

Apes lived in this changing environment, which helped shape their evolution.Their behavior and diet were influenced by the landscape.

Work with Kanzi and other “talking” apes showed that our simian relatives do have some capacity for language, and caused scientists to rethink human uniqueness, Lyn says.

In contrast, bonobos are known as the most empathetic ape, heralded as the pacifist hippies, led by female collectives, who make love, not war. But our new research suggests it is time to leave ...

Researchers have sequenced the complete genomes of six ape species, helping uncover the evolutionary history of our closest relatives and offering insights into what makes humans human. The ...

“Whilst bonobos, who are famously hypersexual, were more likely to engage in so-called ‘make-up sex’ after periods of conflict, we found that chimpanzees, who some view as our more ...

The great apes are the closest living relatives to humans. We share over ninety-eight percent of our DNA with some species of these creatures, and it’s valuable to think of ourselves as being ...

To understand how our body proportions got this way, researchers dissected over a dozen bonobos. Compared to our closest living ape relatives, we have more body fat, and much of our muscle mass ...