Article: Who's your daddy? The Great Apes are among the most popular animals in most zoos. Their actions, facial expressions, and family life remind us so much of ourselves. Have you ever wondered, though, how we might look to them?

A modern, statistically based system of classification called cladistics reveals a surprising possibility: Not only are humans apes, but we are more closely related to some apes--namely the chimpanzees--than the chimpanzees are to orangutans or gorillas. In other words, the chimpanzees' closest living relatives are--us! A gorilla, looking past our culture and technology, might see us humans as just another type of chimpanzee.

What Is Cladistics?

Cladistics is a rigorous, mathematical representation of a simple idea--that all living things are related. These relationships are expressed in diagrams called cladograms.

The simplest cladogram links ...

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