Yep, the rumors are true. DNA is written in an alphabet of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs. There are a HUGE number of nucleotide gbase pairs in human DNA, so two people could share 99.9999999% of their DNA and still differ by several hundred genes. (We are expecting to have exact numbers). But there are actually two species of apes that are this closely related to humans: bonobos (Pan paniscus) and the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). So there is a kind of “pigness” that is exclusive to pigs, and a “humanness” that is exclusive to us. But at the DNA level the genes can vary ever so slightly, and this is where the different alleles come from (slight variations in the same trait). It basically depends on how the comparison is made like if they are talking identical genes or shared sequences. And they do indeed share many genes. Today, bonobos are found in only the Democratic Republic of Congo and there is no evidence that they have interbred with chimpanzees in equatorial Africa since they diverged, perhaps because the Congo River acted as a barrier to prevent the groups from mixing. This confirms that these two species of African apes are still highly similar to each other genetically, even though their populations split apart in Africa about 1 million years ago, perhaps after the Congo River formed and divided an ancestral population into two groups. The analysis of Ulindi's complete genome, reported online today in Nature, reveals that bonobos and chimpanzees share 99.6% of their DNA. Because this is a phrase that we often hear that humans, we share 99% or 99.9% of our genes with each other. But that's amino acids, not DNA. It's the self-replicating material that passes on hereditary traits from one generation to the next. For example, human DNA sequences are over 95% identical to chimpanzee sequences and around 50% identical to banana sequences. Geneticists have long said that humans and chimpanzees, the closest living relative of the humans, share 98.5 % of their DNA; but Uppsala University researchers have … The percentage of DNA shared between other animals means different things. $\begingroup$ @user103431 I think there are around 23,000 accepted protein-coding genes in humans. In fact, such human-animal hybrids are often referred to as “chimeras”. It gives us a sense of being superior, above or outside the biological order. We each have a copy of every gene. Chimpanzees now have to share the distinction of being our closest living relative in the animal kingdom. The team also found some small but tantalizing differences in the genomes of the three species—differences that may explain how bonobos and chimpanzees don't look or act like us even though we share about 99% of our DNA. Our apparent comfort with some hybrids does not stop at plants. Yet there are a few enduring aspects to the way we perceive human-animal hybrids that makes it difficult to think about them clearly. Orangutans, the great apes of Asia, have all but 3 percent of their DNA in line with a human’s. These differences suggest that the ancestral population of apes that gave rise to humans, chimps, and bonobos was quite large and diverse genetically—numbering about 27,000 breeding individuals. The genes of organisms that look very different are surprisingly similar. In the end, while mythical hybrid beasts may have caused alarm for the Greeks, it would seem that our own objection to growing our next heart in the breast of a pig has more to do with existential angst and a disruption of the moral order. 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