Don't have much time to comment, but I thought I'd point you to pending paper in PNAS (as usual, PNAS' webmaster is slow in getting this out though the press release says it is on their website) which suggests chimps have copy number variations similar to H. sapiens. The human genome is obviously interesting, but the recent focus on chimps too is obviously going to be important because to answer the question "what does it mean to be human?" it is good to have some perspective, and chimps are our nearest living relatives.
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It's up, dude: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0602318103v1
Enjoy.
I've always thought rhesus macaques resemble humans more than Chimps do, as well as Gorillas. These animals are obviously also close relations of ours, but apparently not nearly as close as Chimps are. The thing about Chimps in particular is their high intelligence & exceptional memory, as i've learned from De Waal. I wonder what the karyotypes of other primates are (how different they are from ours). Judging from the list of extinct fossil primates, the order was much more interesting & varied hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago. Although i'm not sure whether most of those were prosimians rather than higher type apes.
Do Chimps ever catch common colds, &, if they do, is it fatal?