A prominent example is LAVA, a novel retrotransposon that emerged exclusively in gibbon (Carbone et al. 2012), and potentially related to the fast karyotype evolution of this ape lineage (Carbone et al. 2014).
This suggests that different rates of protein evolution might have occurred in the evolution of the great ape ABAD/HSD10 proteins.
In addition to clarifying the ancestry of Australopithecus, these early fossils have also provided insight into the evolution of the living apes.
The gene, known as the ASPM gene, has been under steady selective pressure throughout the evolution of the great apes, a group that includes orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and humans, Dr. Lahn and colleagues say in an article being published today in the journal Human Molecular Genetics.
Although it's not yet clear whether the acquired genes were ultimately beneficial or harmful, the finding strengthens the idea that such cross-species mating played an important role in the evolution of the great apes.
A similar event has been shown to have occurred during evolution of the great apes, leading in that case to a transcribed and translated product, BIRC8 (ILP-2), from a single-exon gene [10].
Table 1 provides a list of hominoids and other closely related primates that figure in the origin, evolution, and diversification of the ape and human lineage.
Comparative studies will also shed more light on the evolution of all the Great Apes; but the key question is whether the bounty of genetic information contains clues to the moment when the first genes emerged that made humans capable of abstract thought.
Either there has been an increase in the rate of evolution of the DupA region in apes relative to DupB, or multiple losses of the DupA region in the common ancestors of the monkeys examined in this study.
Within the apes a convergent evolution of the different blood groups can be observed, although no ape displays all three phenotypes known in humans [ 3].
