Thomas Mailmund is going ape over chimps & humans again, Patterns of autosomal divergence between the human and chimpanzee genomes support an allopatric model of speciation. A review of a paper of the same name.
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Good news! The gorilla genome sequence was published in Nature last week, and adds to our body of knowledge about primate evolution. Here's the abstract:
Gorillas are humans' closest living relatives after chimpanzees, and are of comparable importance for the study of human origins and evolution.…
Thomas Mailund on Doubts about complex speciation between humans and chimpanzees:
Two patterns from large-scale DNA sequence data have been put forward as evidence that speciation between humans and chimpanzees was complex, involving hybridization and strong selection. First, divergence between…
This week's phylogeny comes from this paper on molecular dating of speciation events. I won't be addressing molecular dating per se, but I will be dealing with what molecular clocks tell us. Like, do they actually reveal the speciation time of a pair of species?
The divergence date of a pair of…
According to this paper, a hidden Markov model of the divergence between humans and chimps finds "a very recent speciation time of human-chimp (4.1 ± 0.4 million years)". This would put the last common ancestor with Pan after a previously
reported date of between 4.98 and 7.02 million years. (…