Evolutionists have long trumpeted the “fact” that humans and chimps have 98.5% the same DNA as proof of common ancestry. They argue this approx. 1% difference can easily be accommodated by the known mutation rates over the last few million years. But initially the chimp DNA had only been approximated. In fact, they used the human DNA blueprint to build out the chimp’s DNA (with the evolutionary assumption that we were closely related as the rationale for doing that). But just a couple of months ago, a full analysis of the DNA of multiple apes was completed and released. This is the first truly independent sequencing of the chimp genome. The results are stunning. The similarity between human and chimp DNA is only 84-85%. This is a major blow to the idea that we share a recent common ancestor. (Yoo, D. et al., “Complete Sequencing of Ape Genomes,” Nature: 641, 2025, pp. 401–418.) So far, there has not been a lot of response to this from the Darwinist community. But this is a bombshell development. At known mutation rates, you cannot account for such a big difference in only a few million years. They will either have to throw away the idea of our sharing a common ancestor or, more likely, push that hypothesized human-ape ancestor back a lot further in the evolutionary timeline. Either way, it will show just how speculative the whole evolutionary family tree really is!
New Chimp DNA Study
