Washington: In a significant breakthrough, researchers have found that humans are so closely related to chimpanzees that they not only are part of the same taxonomic family, but also the same genus.

The new study found that 99.4 per cent of the most critical DNA sites are identical in the corresponding human and chimp genes.

With that close a relationship, the two living chimp species belong in the genus Homo, said Morris Goodman of Wayne State University in Detroit, according to a report in 'New Scientist'.

The closeness of relationship between chimps and humans has become an important issue outside taxonomy, becoming part of the debate over the use of chimps in laboratory experiments and over their conservation in the wild, the report said.

Traditionally, chimps are classified with the other great apes, gorillas and orangutans, in the family Pongidae, separated from the human family Hominidae. Within Hominidae, most paleoanthropologists now class virtually all hominid fossils in three genera, Homo, Australopithecus, or Ardipithecus.

On the basis of the new study, Goodman would not only put modern humans and all fossils back to the human-chimp divergence into Homo, but would also include the common chimp (Pan troglodytes) and the bonobo (Pan Paniscus), the report added.

ANI