How many chromosomes do the apes have?
First of all, don’t confuse apes with monkeys. Chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans are apes. They have no prehensil tail. Monkeys have tails. Human beings have 23 pairs of chromosomes. Apes have 24 pairs. Taxonomists believe that a common ancestor of apes and humans had 24 pairs of chromosomes. As humans and apes evolved along different lines, the two smallest ape chromosomes were combined into a single, larger human chromosome. Most ape and human chromosomes are identical. The 9th and the 14th ape chromosomes, when combined, are like a palindrome of the human 12th chromosome. That is, when viewed on a chromatic scale, if the ape chromosomes (9 + 14) are joined and flipped over, the result would look just like the human #12 chromosome. That’s what makes apes so genetically close to human beings, despite the difference in the number of chromosomes.
