--- title: How close are apes to us? — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «How close are apes to us?», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Put your hand next to a picture of a chimpanzee's hand: five fingers, flat fingernails, a thumb that can touch the fingers; you are looking at a --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/17-how-close-are-apes-to-us/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/) / How close are apes to us? # How close are apes to us? Lesson 17 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 17 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/biology/17-how-close-are-apes-to-us/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/17-how-close-are-apes-to-us/0/) — Put your hand next to a picture of a chimpanzee's hand: five fingers, flat fingernails, a thumb that can touch the fingers; you are looking at a cousin. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/17-how-close-are-apes-to-us/1/) — Humans did not come from chimps; chimps and humans are both great apes that changed in different ways from one shared ancestor about 6 to 7 million years ago, like two cousins with the same great-great-grandparents. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/17-how-close-are-apes-to-us/3/) — The differences matter too: we walk upright all the time, our brain is about three times bigger, we speak, and we lost most of our fur and learned to sweat, so we can walk and run for hours in the sun. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/17-how-close-are-apes-to-us/4/) — Apes are not just worse humans: a young chimp called Ayumu beat grown-up people at a quick number memory game, and chimp groups even have their own traditions. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/17-how-close-are-apes-to-us/5/) — Chimps have hands like ours, with fingernails and a thumb that can touch the fingers, and their big toe can grasp too; a chimp's thumb is shorter, so we are better at fine work like writing. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/17-how-close-are-apes-to-us/6/) — DNA is the set of instructions for building a body that every cell carries; about 98 to 99 percent of the DNA that can be compared is the same in humans and chimps, because we split from a common ancestor about 6 to 7 million years ago; even a small difference in DNA can make a big difference in bodies and brains. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/17-how-close-are-apes-to-us/7/) — It is a myth that people came from chimps: chimps and humans are cousins who both changed from a common ancestor. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/17-how-close-are-apes-to-us/8/) — DNA is packed into tiny threads called chromosomes; human cells have 46 chromosomes and great apes have 48, because long ago two ape chromosomes joined into one, our chromosome 2, and the joined ends can still be seen. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/17-how-close-are-apes-to-us/9/) — Young apes make a panting laugh when tickled or play-wrestling, which shows it is only a game; human laughter probably came from this play-panting. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/17-how-close-are-apes-to-us/10/) — Baby chimps drink their mother's milk for about 4 or 5 years; big brains take a long time to grow and learn, so apes and humans have long childhoods, and human babies are even more helpless at birth. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/17-how-close-are-apes-to-us/11/) — Humans are the only apes that walk upright all the time, with an S-shaped spine, wide hips and arched feet; footprints at Laetoli in Tanzania show human relatives walking upright about 3.7 million years ago. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/17-how-close-are-apes-to-us/12/) — The human brain is about three times as big as a chimp's and uses about a fifth of the body's energy at rest. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/17-how-close-are-apes-to-us/13/) — Ayumu, a chimp in Kyoto, Japan, could remember where numbers flashed on a screen for less than a second, better than most people. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/17-how-close-are-apes-to-us/14/) — Apes cannot speak words like us because their throat, tongue and breathing control are different, but the bonobo Kanzi learned hundreds of symbols, first by watching his mother's lessons. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/17-how-close-are-apes-to-us/15/) — Lucy is a skeleton of an early human relative, Australopithecus afarensis, found in Ethiopia in 1974; she lived about 3.2 million years ago, walked upright and still climbed trees, and was named after a Beatles song. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/17-how-close-are-apes-to-us/16/) — Chimp groups have their own traditions, like nut cracking in West Africa but not in East Africa, passed on by copying; scientists call this culture. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/17-how-close-are-apes-to-us/17/) — Humans have about as many hair roots as chimps, but our hairs are mostly short and fine; less fur and lots of sweat keep us cool, making humans among the best long-distance runners of all animals. - ← previous: [The great apes: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/16-the-great-apes/) - next →: [The lion: why people call it «king of the beasts»; prides and roars](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/18-the-lion-king-of-the-beasts/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)