HUMANS might be the smartest of the apes, but our molecular clocks tick the slowest. The rate at which mutations accumulate in non-coding DNA is a known as the molecular clock, and ours is 3 per cent slower than that of chimps, and 11 per cent below that of gorillas.
What is more, not so long ago, in evolutionary terms, our forebears were much younger when they first gave birth – much the same as chimps today.
The findings come from a new comparison of the molecular clocks of great apes, the first genome-wide analysis of its kind. Humans have the…
