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http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/070223_chimp_split.html
First Humans: Time of Origin Pinned Down
By Robin Lloyd
The lineages of humans and chimpanzees, our closest relatives, diverged from one another about 4.1 million years ago, according to a new estimate that is said to be far more precise than previous ranges for this critical evolutionary moment.
Asger Hobolth of North Carolina State University and his colleagues arrived at the estimate of "the time we became human," or the time in the past when descendents of the human-chimp ancestor split into human and chimp, by statistically comparing DNA from four regions of the human, chimp and gorilla genomes.
The new divergence date is considered fairly recent. Previous estimates, based on fossil evidence, put the most recent common ancestor of humans and chimps on Earth anywhere from 2 million to 10 million years ago.
"Primate evolution is a central topic in biology and much information can be obtained from DNA sequence data," Hobolth said in a prepared statement.
The team also came up with a fairly large estimate for the size of the ancestral population of the primates just before human and chimp species evolved from it—about 65,000 individuals. Other primates would have existed at the time, too, but not all were ancestors of ours.
The divergence date has been a matter of hot debate at least since the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species."
The new estimate supports claims that recently discovered primate fossils, the Millennium man (Orrorin tugenesis) and Sahelanthropus, are not on the human lineage but belong rather to an ancestral lineage from which both humans and chimps evolved.