Genes tell a story

For example, the study finds that a single gorilla gene associated with enhanced production of keratin - a protein that toughens the apes’ fingernails, skin and especially their knuckle pads - is absent from the human genome.

A group of genes, associated with hearing, tells another story.

“It’s been known for some time that hearing genes in humans have shown accelerated evolution," Tyler-Smith says, "but what we could see by sequencing the gorilla genome was that this acceleration goes back millions of years. So the implication of that is that this is not because of human language ability, it must be for some broader role that these play.”

The gorilla genome sequencing also identified several genes that cause disease in humans, but not in gorillas. One gene leads to a form of human dementia, a second is associated with heart failure in people.

“If we could understand more about why those variants are so harmful in humans, but not in gorillas, that would have important or useful medical implications,” says Tyler-Smith, who intends to explore the ancestral family tree further, to learn what happened as humans and apes evolved on their separate paths.

He says the gorilla sequence is a template that will help to explain many of those evolutionary mysteries.