Among the living primates, humans are most closely related to the apes, which include the lesser apes (gibbons) and the great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans).

Fossil evidence from this part of the primate family tree is scarce, and consists mostly of isolated teeth and broken jaw fragments. (“Nyanza” is the province in western Kenya where the first specimen of Nyanzapithecus was found, and “pithecus” comes from the Greek word for “ape.”), “Nyanzapithecus alesi was part of a group of primates that existed in Africa for over 10 million years,” lead study author Isaiah Nengo, of Stony Brook University in New York, said in the statement.

Due to complex hybrid speciation, it is not possible to give a precise estimate on the age of this ancestral population. 2008 Apr;212(4):501-43. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-7580.2008.00870.x. (2006). “Because they are probably close to the ancestor of all living apes, the specimen may help give us some sort of idea of what the common ancestor of all living apes and modern humans might have looked like, and because our specimen looks most similar to gibbons among living apes, it would potentially support the idea that the common ancestor of living apes and humans looked like a gibbon,” Gilbert said.

Copyright 2017 LIVESCIENCE.com, a Purch company. [23][24] Such a scenario would explain why the divergence age between the Homo and Pan has varied with the chosen method and why a single point has so far been hard to track down.

A possible candidate is Graecopithecus. Determining that the last common ancestors of living apes and humans originated in Africa is important because it helps scientists better understand how ancient climate, ecology, geography and other factors were key to their evolution. While "original divergence" between populations may have occurred as early as 13 million years ago (Miocene), hybridization may have been ongoing until as recently as 4 million years ago (Pliocene).

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See this image and copyright information in PMC. Epub 2004 Oct 21. J. Phys. B Biol. The small snout of the skull would have made Alesi look like a baby gibbon.

[8] It is most likely derived from the chimpanzee lineage and thus not directly ancestral to humans. doi: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2015.02.009. “It probably had a more slow-climbing form of locomotion, more like [that of] a chimpanzee,” Miller said. [21] Some time during the late Miocene or early Pliocene, the earliest members of the human clade completed a final separation from the lineage of Pan — with date estimates ranging from 13 million[15] to as recent as 4 million years ago. J Hum Evol. ", "Reconstructing human evolution: Achievements, challenges, and opportunities", "Reconstructing Phylogenies and Phenotypes: A Molecular View of Human Evolution", "Human evolution: taxonomy and paleobiology", "Potential hominin affinities of Graecopithecus from the Late Miocene of Europe", "Graecopithecus freybergi: Oldest Hominin Lived in Europe, not Africa", "Comment on the Paleobiology and Classification of Ardipithecus ramidus", "Virtual ancestor reconstruction: Revealing the ancestor of modern humans and Neandertals", "Strong male bias drives germline mutation in chimpanzees", "Variation in the molecular clock of primates", "Insights into hominid evolution from the gorilla genome sequence", Locomotion and posture from the common hominoid ancestor to fully modern hominins, with special reference to the last common panin/hominin ancestor, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chimpanzee–human_last_common_ancestor&oldid=973187098, Short description with empty Wikidata description, All articles with specifically marked weasel-worded phrases, Articles with specifically marked weasel-worded phrases from June 2019, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 15 August 2020, at 21:25.

USA.gov. [13][14], An estimate of TCHLCA at 10 to 13 million years was proposed in 1998,[note 1] and a range of 7 to 10 million years ago is assumed by White et al. [6] This would put the CHLCA split in Europe instead of Africa.[7].