Man and ape have a genetic similarity of about 98 percent, but even the external differences between them are more than obvious. Monkeys hear, see differently and develop physically faster.
Structure
Many features that distinguish humans from monkeys are immediately noticeable. For example, upright posture. Despite the fact that gorillas can walk on their hind legs, this is an unnatural process for them. The person is comfortable to move in an upright position due to the flexible lumbar arch, arched feet and long straight legs, which are lacking in monkeys.
But between man and ape there are distinctive features that only zoologists can tell. For example, experts note that some of the traits make a person closer to marine mammals than to primates - a thick layer of fat and skin rigidly attached to the muscle frame.
There are significant differences in the vocal abilities of humans and monkeys. So, our larynx in relation to the mouth occupies a much lower position than any other species of primates. The resulting common "tube" provides a person with exceptional capabilities of the speech resonator.
Brain
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The volume of the human brain is almost three times the size of the monkey's - 1600 and 600 cm3, which gives us an advantage in the development of mental abilities. The monkey brain lacks speech centers and association zones that humans have. This led to the emergence of not only the first signaling system (conditioned and unconditioned reflexes), but also the second, which is responsible for speech forms of communication.
But more recently, British scientists have discovered in the human brain a much more noticeable detail that the monkey brain lacks - this is the lateral frontal pole of the prefrontal cortex. It is he who is responsible for strategic planning, task differentiation and decision making.
Hearing
Human hearing is particularly sensitive to the perception of sound frequencies - in the range from approximately 20 to 20,000 Hz. But in some monkeys, the ability to distinguish frequencies is much higher than that of humans. For example, Filipino tarsiers can hear sounds up to 90,000 Hz.
True, the selective ability of human auditory neurons, which make it possible to perceive the difference in sounds differing by 3-6 Hz higher than in monkeys. Moreover, humans have a unique ability to relate sounds to each other.
However, monkeys can also perceive a number of repeated sounds of different heights, but if this row is shifted by several tones up or down (change the tonality), then the melodic pattern will be unrecognizable for animals. It is not difficult for a person to guess the same sequence of sounds in different keys.
Childhood
Newborn babies are completely helpless and completely dependent on their parents, while baby monkeys can already hang and move from place to place. Unlike a monkey, humans need a much longer time to mature. So, for example, a female gorilla reaches sexual maturity by the age of 8, given that her pregnancy period is almost the same as that of a woman.
Newborn children, unlike baby monkeys, have much less developed instincts - a person gets most of life skills in the learning process. It is important to note that a person is formed in the process of direct communication with their own kind, while a monkey is born with an already established form of its existence.
Sexuality
By virtue of innate instincts, the male monkey is always able to recognize when the female is ovulating. A person does not have this ability. But there is also a more significant difference between humans and monkeys: this is the occurrence of menopause in humans. The only exception in the animal kingdom is the black dolphin.
Man and monkey also differ in the structure of the genitals. So, not a single ape has a hymen. On the other hand, the genital organ of the male of any primate contains the groove bone (cartilage), which is absent in humans. There is another characteristic feature regarding sexual behavior. Face-to-face sexual contact, which is so popular with humans, is unnatural for monkeys.
Genetics
Geneticist Steve Jones once observed that "50% of human DNA is similar to that of bananas, but that does not mean that we are half bananas, either from head to waist or from waist to foot." The same can be said when comparing a man to a monkey. The minimal difference in genotype between humans and monkeys - about 2% - nevertheless forms a huge gap between species.
The difference includes about 150 million unique nucleotides, which contain about 50 million individual mutation events. Such changes, according to scientists, cannot be achieved even on an evolutionary time scale of 250 thousand generations, which once again refutes the theory of the origin of humans from the great apes.
There are significant differences between humans and monkeys in the set of chromosomes: if we have 46, then gorillas and chimpanzees have 48. Moreover, human chromosomes have genes that are absent in chimpanzees, which reflects the difference between the immune system of humans and animals. Another interesting statement by geneticists is that the human Y chromosome differs from a similar chromosome in chimpanzees as much as it does from a chicken Y chromosome.
There is also a difference in the size of the genes. When comparing human and chimpanzee DNA, it was found that the monkey's genome is 12% larger than the human genome. And the difference in the expression of human and monkey genes in the cerebral cortex was expressed in 17.4%.
A genetic study by scientists from London has revealed a possible reason why monkeys are unable to speak. So they determined that the FOXP2 gene plays an important role in the formation of the speech apparatus in humans. Geneticists decided on a desperate experiment and inserted the FOXP2 gene in chimpanzees, hoping that the monkey would speak. But nothing of the kind happened - the zone responsible for the functions of speech in humans, in chimpanzees, regulates the vestibular apparatus. The ability to climb trees in the course of evolution for the monkey turned out to be much more important than the development of verbal communication skills.