Humans are members of the order Primates, which also includes other apes, monkeys, and lemurs. Genetic evidence shows that chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, and our lineages diverged from each other roughly 8.0 to 7.0 million years ago. Since then, chimpanzees and humans have evolved along their own paths to become the modern versions that exist in the world today. Paleoanthropologists study the fossil record on the human branch of the evolutionary tree after the split from the “LCA” or last common ancestor. There is a lot of debate as to how closely the last common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees resembled modern day chimpanzees.

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