In early works, divergence of human and chimpanzee genomes was estimated as roughly 1%. It’s a difficult task to quantitate the exact percentage of differences between human and chimpanzee genomes.
It is still of a great interest to identify genetic elements that distinguish humans from chimpanzees and encode features of human physiological and mental identities. The divergence of human and chimpanzee ancestors dates back to approximately 6,5–7,5 million years ago or even earlier. In this review, we summarized the available information about genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees and their potential functional impacts on differential molecular, anatomical, physiological and cognitive peculiarities of these species. Most structural gene-influential changes happened at the level of expression regulation, which in turn provoked larger alterations of interactome gene regulation networks. However, despite of extensive knowledge of structural genomic changes accompanying human evolution we still cannot identify with certainty the causative genes of human identity. Moreover, much higher proportion is made by differential chromosomal inversions and translocations comprising several megabase-long regions or even whole chromosomes. Human-specific single nucleotide alterations constituted 1.23% of human DNA, whereas more extended deletions and insertions cover ~ 3% of our genome.
After divergence of their ancestor lineages, human and chimpanzee genomes underwent multiple changes including single nucleotide substitutions, deletions and duplications of DNA fragments of different size, insertion of transposable elements and chromosomal rearrangements. Genetic features distinguishing us from chimpanzees and making us humans are still of a great interest. The divergence between human and chimpanzee ancestors dates to approximately 6,5–7,5 million years ago. Chimpanzees are the closest living relatives of humans.
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