Charming reporting Moments:
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Humans and chimpanzees diverged approximately 7 million years ago, while the history of life on Earth spans 3.7 billion years. Remarkably, in less than 0.2% of this history, humans and chimpanzees exhibit 35 million single-base variations and 90 million insertion-deletion variations! Proportionally, this accounts for 4%. What does 4% mean? It means that on average, 1 in every 25 bases is different! Moreover, the entire human chromosome 2 is distinct, as it resulted from a chromosomal fusion!
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Chimpanzees and humans are so similar, from physical appearance to tool use, playing games, and levels of socialization. Yet, the genetic difference between humans is only 0.1%, whereas the genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees is 400 times greater!
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On just 24 chromosomes, there are as many as 202 human accelerated regions that are significantly different from those of chimpanzees!
The reporting above highlight the minimal genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees in contrast to common perceptions.
The widely known “1% difference” figure comes from a 1975 Science article, at a time when gene mapping and cloning were extremely challenging, and even the genes for many important human proteins had not yet been identified.
The Human Genome Project began in 1990 and is expected to last 13 years. When it crossed into the new millennium, likely under multiple pressures (speculated reasons: prolonged timelines, the original 13-year deadline, political factors, and the failure of the “Cancer Moonshot” initiative), the British Prime Minister and U.S. President publicly announced the “completion” of the Human Genome Project. Excluding the telomere regions, which are highly repetitive and difficult to sequence due to lack of low-repetition bilateral references, about 7 chromosomes were fully sequenced, with 2 others sequenced in a very rough manner.
By 2005, sequencing of 21 human chromosomes was “completed,” and the chimpanzee genome also had its initial draft finished. Data from this version indicated an approximate 4% sequence difference.
However, the end-to-end (telomere-to-telomere) humansequencing was only completed in 2022.
Since then, updates on the differences between human and chimpanzee genomes have increasingly focused on sequence quality and function, particularly in the non-coding regions identified and studied by projects such as ENCODE and FANTOM.
