User:Rpere110/Incomplete lineage sorting

In Human Evolution
In human evolution, incomplete lineage sorting is used to diagram hominin lineages that may have failed to sort out at the same time that speciation occurred in prehistory. Due to the advent of genetic testing and genome sequencing, researchers found that the genetic relationships between hominin lineages might disagree with previous understandings of their relatedness based on physical characteristics. Moreover, divergence of the last common ancestor (LCA) may not necessarily occur at the same time as speciation. Lineage sorting is a method that allows paleo-anthropologists to explore the genetic relationships and divergences that may not fit with their previous speciation models based on phylogeny alone.

Incomplete lineage sorting of the human family tree is an area of great interest. There are a number of unknowns when considering both the transition from archaic humans to modern humans and divergence of the other great apes from the hominin lineage.

Ape and Hominin / Human divergence
Using genetic testing we can determine that the human and chimpanzee genome split dates further back than that of the human and gorilla split. What that means is the common ancestor of the human and chimpanzee have left traces of genetic material that can be found in the common ancestor of human, chimpanzee, and gorilla. This makes the most recent common ancestor between gorilla and human. However, the genetic tree slightly differs from that of the species or phylogeny tree. In the phylogeny tree when we look at the evolutionary relationship between the human, bonobo chimpanzee, and gorilla, the results show that the separation of bonobo and chimpanzee transpired in a close proximity of time to the split of the common ancestor, the bonobo-chimpanzee ancestor, and humans. Indicating that humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor for several million years after separation from gorillas. This creates the phenomenon that is Incomplete lineage sorting. Today researchers are relying on DNA fragments in order to study the evolutionary relationships among humans and their counterparts in hopes that it provides information about speciation and ancestral processes from genomes from different types of humans.