부산대학교 도서관

The study of primate phylogeny and human evolution through the genetic information in the DNA of genomes and in the proteins that genes encode. The first studies in molecular anthropology used immunological and biochemical methods to obtain information from proteins on the degrees of genetic similarity of humans and other primates. These results not only placed chimpanzees and gorillas closest to humans rather than to orangutans, but also indicated that the very close kinship between chimpanzees and gorillas was not any closer than the kinship of each to humans. Subsequent studies that extracted genetic information directly from DNA extended this original finding. Indeed, the accumulating comparative DNA sequence data provide extensive, commanding evidence that the closest genetic kinship is between chimpanzees and humans rather than between chimpanzees and gorillas. DNA sequence comparisons now provide evidence of the degrees of kinship that exist among nearly all living primate genera. There is also mounting evidence that the rates of nucleotide substitutions slowed during human evolutionary history. However, during this history, bursts of accelerated amino acid changing substitutions occurred among genes with protein products that are important for brain functioning. Whereas the slowed substitution rates suggest that mutation rates slowed, the accelerated amino acid changing substitutions suggest that positive selection for adaptive protein changes occurred.