ORANGUTANS ARE HUMAN CLOSEST RELATIVES BUT ARE WE NEGLECTING TO THEM?
Once a month award-winning National Geographic photographer Jayaprakash Bojan boards a friend’s houseboat and putt-putts down the Sekonyer River which wends its way through the Tanjung Puting National Park in Kalimantan.
“There was mum and dad with their babies on their back gently moving across the current to the riverbank on the other side,” Bojan tells National Geographic.
Orangutans, not chimpanzees, are the closest living relatives to humans, a controversial new study contends.
The authors base their conclusion on a close physical resemblance between orangutans and humans, which they say has been overshadowed by genetic evidence linking us to chimps.
John Grehan, of the Buffalo Museum of Science in New York State, and Jeffrey Schwartz, of the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, say that the DNA evidence cited by many scientists only looks at a small percentage of the human and chimp genomes.