If Indo-European is related to other language families e.g., to Afro-Asiatic (which includes the Semitic languages) or to Kartvelian (which includes Georgian)—it must have diverged from them much earlier than it diverged from Uralic, because the number of cogent resemblances is still smaller.
Though Chuvash is closely related to the Turkic languages and many scholars accordingly consider it to be Turkic, certain features suggest it early diverged from them, leading some to speak of a Chuvash-Turkic family, while yet others treat Chuvash as a separate that is, fourth branch of Altaic.
The closest sister family to the Liliaceae are the Smilacaceae, having diverged from them between 65 and 55 million years ago.
The Procellariiformes are (2014) considered to be most closely related to penguins, having diverged from them about 60 million years ago.
Haliclystus antarcticus from Chile forms a clade with these specimens and is only slightly diverged from them.
Necterosoma darwini, which is the next closest relative to these four species, diverged from them by only 1.26 to 1.75%, but it was readily diagnosable through one fixed nucleotide change (as a comparison, N. souzannae, diverging by approximately 12%, could be diagnosed through 52 characters).
This enabled us to define a transcriptional baseline and detect genes whose expression significantly diverged, implicating them as candidate factors in a parasite transcriptional adaptation to the pfcrt and pfmdr1 changes that were genetically introduced.
A way around this was to imagine that eukaryotes had not emerged from within prokaryotes after all, and were instead a parallel line of descent anciently diverged from them at some inchoate stage of cellular and genomic evolution.
More specifically, Aquificales may be placed close to Thermotogales not because they last diverged from them, but because they share a common ecological niche, i.e. they are both hyperthermophilic, which led both their rRNA [ 16] and their protein sequences [ 17] to adapt to high temperatures.
This is especially surprising given that the skates are thought to be the sister-group to all other extant elasmobranchs [ 14] and therefore must have diverged from them in the late Triassic or early Jurassic at least 200 million years ago.
