Are gorillas more similar to bonobos or to common chimps?

[Raugust]

I hear a lot of disputes over whether humans have more in common with bonobos or with common chimpanzees, the two species who are (equally) our closest relatives. Genetically, the question may be meaningless, since chimpanzees split off from us before splitting from each other. But it remains possible that our behavioral similarity to one of these species is based more on convergence, while our similarity with the other species is based more on common descent.

 

Here's a line of questioning that may shed light on the former question, and that I haven't heard explained elsewhere: How similar are our other closest great ape relatives (chiefly gorillas, but also orangutans) to each of the chimpanzee species? Is one or the other especially unusual, in the context of the hominids or hominoids? And is there a good resource where I could see comparative ethological work along these lines?

[ydoaPs]

The gorilla lineage split off before the split between the two types of chimps.

Edited July 5, 2012 by ydoaPs

[Raugust]

The gorilla lineage split off before the split between the two types of chimps.

Yeah, that's why I'm asking about gorillas. Since we're having difficulty deciding whether the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees was (behaviorally) more like a bonobo or more like a common chimpanzee, I'm curious about whether gorillas are behaviorally more like a bonobo or more like a common chimpanzee, as a more indirect way of gaining some evidence regarding our common ancestor -- from knowledge about the previous common ancestor.

Edited July 5, 2012 by Raugust

[Moontanman]

I'm not sure if this answers your question.

 

 

Phylogeny of the great ape family, showing the speciation of human (H), chimpanzee ©, gorilla (G) and orang-utan (O). Horizontal lines indicate speciation times within the hominine subfamily and the sequence divergence time between human and orang-utan. Interior grey lines illustrate an example of incomplete lineage sorting at a particular genetic locus—in this case (((C, G), H), O) rather than (((H, C), G), O). Below are mean nucleotide divergences between human and the other great apes from the EPO alignment.