extinction

This is actually an issue I have been working on for more than 6 years. It was 6 years ago that I realized how close to extinction the Mountain Gorillas had come. At the time there were some 650 known alive in the wild. That's it. That is so dangerously tiny a population that it is on the border of not being genetically viable. Since then there has been an improvement (there are now about 700 Mountain Gorillas alive in the wild.) But the situation has also gotten even more dire since the civil war in the Congo is threatening the Virunga, the single national park where Mountain Gorillas live, and in the past year, 10 gorillas have been killed...really murdered. That is more than 1% of their population killed in one year.

And today, the Virunga National Park has been overrun by the Congolese rebels. The army is counter attacking, but in essence the Congolese civil war now has completely engulfed the Mountain Gorillas. This is happening right now. Today. As you read this.

Chimps and Bonobos are are closest relatives, being about 98-99% identical to us genetically. That means that looking at the exact order of nucleotides in any given Chimp and you, 98%+ of those nucleotides will be exactly the same. The difference is so close compared with some animals considered branches of the same species (e.g. dogs and wolves), that technically speaking, Chimps, Bonobos and humans really should be lumped together in the same genus. Humans are merely a third chimpanzee, as outlined very effectively by Jared Diamond in his book of that name.