www.nature.com/nature Vol 437|Issue no. 7055|1 September 2005

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48 TIMELINE A brief history of chimps

50 NEWS AND VIEWS The chimpanzeeand usW-H Li & M A Saunders

PROGRESS

52 The second inheritance system ofchimpanzees and humansA Whiten

56 A century of getting to know thechimpanzeeF B M de Waal

60 Our chimpanzee mindM Hauser

64 Molecular insights into human brainevolutionR S Hill & C A Walsh

ARTICLES

69 Initial sequence of the chimpanzeegenome and comparison with thehuman genomeThe Chimpanzee Sequencing andAnalysis Consortium

88 A genome-wide comparison of recentchimpanzee and human segmentalduplicationsZ Cheng, M Ventura, X She, P Khaitovich, T Graves, K Osoegawa, D Church, P DeJong, R K Wilson, S Pääbo, M Rocchi & E E Eichler

94 Human subtelomeres are hot spots ofinterchromosomal recombination andsegmental duplicationE V Linardopoulou, E M Williams, Y Fan,C Friedman, J M Young & B J Trask

LETTERS

101 Conservation of Y-linked genes duringhuman evolution revealed bycomparative sequencing inchimpanzeeJ F Hughes, H Skaletsky, T Pyntikova, P J Minx, T Graves, S Rozen, R K Wilson& D C Page

105 First fossil chimpanzeeS McBrearty & N G Jablonski

The mosaic on the cover to thisspecial section is by LeslieGaffney and Eric Lander,created by RunawayTechnology, Inc. withPhotoMosaic by Robert Silvers.(Courtesy of the Broad Instituteof Harvard and MIT.) The issuecover shows an adult femalechimpanzee, Jolie of the Ngogocommunity in Kibale NationalPark, Uganda, less than amonth before she gave birth to her first infant. The photo is part of photographer KevinLangergraber’s ongoing studyof the effect of geneticrelatedness on patterns ofaffiliation and cooperation inwild chimpanzees.

Until now, genome sequence information hasshown us how many seemingly very differentorganisms are amazingly like humans. At aconservative estimate we share about 88%

of our genes with rodents and 60% with chickens.Applying a more liberal definition of similarity, up to80% of the sea-squirt’s genes are found in humans insome form. So it’s no surprise that we are still asking,“What makes us human?” To apply genomics to thisquest, we need to shift the focus to look at our closestliving relative, the chimpanzee. Given that we sharemore than 98% of our DNA and almost all of our genes,chimps are the best starting point to study not thesimilarities, but the minute differences that set us apart.

We are therefore extremely pleased to present thisspecial section to commemorate the genome of thecommon chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes. In doing so, wehope to provide a resource for more than just genomics.We introduce the section with a timeline that charts thehistory of the chimp. This is followed by four Progresspieces that review recent work on chimp culture andbehaviour, psychology and neural processing ofnumber systems, as well as a closer look at brainanatomy and neurogenetics at the single-gene level.

On page 69, the Chimpanzee Sequencing andAnalysis Consortium reports analysis of the long-awaited draft genome sequence. This is supported onpage 101 by Hughes et al., with the sequence of part of the chimpanzee Y chromosome. Comparing thegenetic code of humans and chimps will allow us tocomb through each gene or regulatory region to findsingle changes that might have made a difference inevolution, and the authors list some new candidates forfurther study. Two more research papers by Cheng et al.(page 88) and Linardopoulou et al. (page 94) detailchanges in highly variable regions in the human andchimp genomes; additions or deletions of larger chunksof DNA may be as important as single nucleotidechanges in shaping our genomes.

Finally, we need physical evidence to tell us howchimps and humans may have lived millions of years ago.Surprisingly, to date there has been no fossil record ofthe chimp; on page 105, McBrearty and Jablonski reportthe first unequivocal fossil evidence of the genus Pan.

Chris Gunter, Senior EditorRitu Dhand, Chief Biology EditorCommissioning Editors: Tanguy Chouard, Henry Gee,Jane Rees & John Spiro

THE CHIMPANZEE GENOME

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