American Association of Physical Anthropologists Meeting: Gorillas' hidden history revealed

Although gorillas are our closest living relatives other than chimpanzees, their evolution is something of a mystery. A study of nuclear DNA from the two species of wild gorillas offers a glimpse of their mysterious past and of how new species of primates arise. These shy herbivores turn out to have diverged slowly into two species, apparently taking the better part of a million years, according to molecular anthropologist Linda Vigilant of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Previous studies of the paternally inherited Y chromosome from gorillas suggested that the two species, eastern gorillas and western gorillas, interbred until recently. But maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA suggested that they separated more than 1 million years ago.