"From Ape to Man—or Not" Topic

"Whenever I visit a zoo, there inevitably comes that awkward moment when I make temporary eye contact with a primate. It's particularly strange with that closest of relatives, the chimpanzee. After all, the chimp, as we have been told since grade school, is man's closest living relative per fossil evidence and DNA sequencing. In that brief unspoken exchange, I can't help but wonder if I am staring into the eyes of one of my distant kin. But what if that categorization is simplistic, and even perhaps wrong? Such is the claim of playwright and novelist Jonathan Leaf in his recent book The Primate Myth: Why the Latest Science Leads Us to a New Theory of Human Nature.

Leaf is no zoologist. Nor is he a biologist or a geneticist. But he is familiar with recent scientific developments, which seem to at least complicate the narrative we have been taught about our evolutionary ancestors. In this book, Leaf argues that man's closest kin is not primates, but herd animals. It's a fascinating thought experiment, but what, in the end, does this categorization tell us about the human animal?

Certainly Leaf believes this question—primate or herd animal?—to be central to modern man's understanding of himself. He proposes a "radically different conception of our nature."…"

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Armand

No it's pretty clear that humans share a closer common ancestor with the other primates and a further common ancestor with other mammals all the way to the first mammal.

Behavior is not a substitute for anatomical and genetic similarities.