Name: The Third Chimpanzee
Rating: 4.4 (169 reviews)
Author: Jared Diamond

What’s in it for me? Get to know your close cousins and learn some human history.

Our fascination with chimpanzees and other primates is nothing new. King Kong, Tarzan, the army of primates in Planet of the Apes, the orangutans at the zoo – when it comes to apish things, we humans seem unable to get enough.

And maybe it makes sense, since they’re our closest evolutionary cousins. In fact, we might be far more closely related to other primates than was previously thought.

Homo sapiens is a complex and fascinating species – a species that, in this age of technology and automation, has never been more important to understand. These blinks explain a revelation that has opened up new opportunities for understanding human essence and human evolution – an understanding that has both its beautiful and its brutal side.

In these blinks, you’ll find out

why chimpanzees are counted as humans by some taxonomists;
how human language may have emerged; and
why we might all have been better off as hunter-gatherers.

Science shows that humans are more genetically similar to other primates than previously thought.

The similarities between humans and other primates aren’t hard to spot. But exactly how genetically similar are we to our wild cousins, and which ones are our closest relatives?

Scientists are now able to look at the human genome and calculate exactly how alike humans and apes are. The results are pretty striking. We share 96.4 percent of our genes with orangutans, 97.7 percent with gorillas and an incredible 98.6 percent with chimpanzees.

Effectively, that means that a mere 1.4 percent of our DNA distinguishes us from chimpanzees. Of that percentage, only a small amount contains the genetic tools that helped us develop those attributes we consider uniquely human, such as language, art and technology.

In fact, we're so genetically close to chimps that some scientists even consider us part of the same family.

In most encyclopedias, you'll find humans and chimpanzees classed in the same order, the Primates, and the same superfamily, the Hominoidea, but in separate families: the Hominidae for humans and Pongidae for chimpanzees.

However, one school of taxonomy – known as the cladistics – arranges species based on relative genetic distance. Using this method, humans and chimps are part of not only the same family, but even the same genus.

They conceive of not one but three separate species within the Homo genus: Homo troglodytes, the common chimpanzee; Homo paniscus, the bonobo; and us, Homo sapiens.

Being in the same genus means the species are very closely related, so much so that sometimes they might be distinguishable only to experts. Take the willow warblers and the chiffchaffs as an example. These European birds share 97.7 percent of the same DNA and look virtually identical. But they're less closely related to each other than humans are to chimps.

So we’re a lot like our chimp cousins – but it’s our few different characteristics, as well as art, technology and language, that really mark our species out.

Language development in humans can be understood through both historical and comparative scientific models.

For centuries, sophisticated human language and communication seemed utterly unlike the grunts and howls of the lower beasts. But scientists have recently analyzed animal communication methods and have shown that they’re actually not so distant from human language.

The animal that has probably come closest to developing a "language” is the vervet, a small African monkey. Electronic analysis of vervets has shown that they react with different vocalizations to different environmental stimuli. Attacks from leopards, eagles or snakes, for instance, cause the vervets to produce varying sound-alarms. They also produce distinct sounds in various social contexts and they can communicate with grunts to indicate whether something is edible or inedible.

Natural and sexual selection gave rise to “racial characteristics”.

As you’ve doubtless noticed, not all human beings look the same. There are tall humans and short humans, humans with lighter skin and humans with darker skin. These are known as racial characteristics, and there are two scientific theories that posit how they developed: natural selection and sexual selection.

Most biologists are proponents of natural selection. This theory claims that racial characteristics emerged in order to improve a population’s chances of survival. For instance, the large chests of Andean Indians enable them to absorb more oxygen from the thin air found at high altitudes.

Genocide is terribly human.

You probably think that only perverted psychopaths resort to genocide. But you’d be wrong. History shows us that genocide is no one-off phenomenon, and that each of us could potentially commit it.

For starters, many instances of genocide have simply been forgotten by the vast majority of humanity.

Key ideas in The Third Chimpanzee

What is The Third Chimpanzee about?

In The Third Chimpanzee (1991), Jared Diamond explores the evolution of Homo sapiens, which started out like any other animal and gradually became a unique creature capable of producing speech, making art and inventing technology. The book reveals some extraordinary insights about the nature of human beings.