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Comment by emporas | Hacker News Reader

What's our closest relative animal, not gone extinct, which is alive in the world today, if not chimps?

Bonobos are exactly as close to us as chimpanzees (by descent). Maybe the “default“ human behavior, independent of the last x thousand years of culture, is closer to one or the other, but I don’t think there’s a good a priori reason to assume that we are “naturally” more chimp-like than bonobo-like.

I agree. Maybe the same variations between chimps and bonobos are exhibited between humans. So some of us are more like chimps, while others more like bonobos. Ancient Greeks said that "In peace, we are the best of the animals, in war, we are the worst".

that does not mean we are descended from them

Indeed it doesn't mean that, you are right. We share so many genes, so loosely speaking, we are their descendants. Which we are not, but for all practical purposes, we can approximately find correlations between our species, and that one, better than any other.

We are descended from chimps in the same way that I am descended from my cousin.

Edit: I'm realizing this could be a language barrier. "Descendent" is the inverse of "ancestor". A descendent is directly downward in lineage from an ancestor.

Oh, yeah, maybe that is. So with chimps we share a common ancestor. Even more accurate, chimps are our closest relative species living on earth today, with which we share the more close/recent ancestor.

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