Humans are most closely related to the great apes, specifically the chimpanzees and bonobos. Among living primates, the closest relatives to humans are the two species of African great apes: Pan troglodytes (common chimpanzee) and Pan paniscus (bonobo). The prevailing consensus from genetic and genomic studies is that humans share more recent common ancestry with chimpanzees and bonobos than with gorillas or orangutans, with chimpanzees and bonobos being the closest living relatives overall.

Key points:

• Chimpanzees and bonobos share the highest percentage of DNA with humans, with estimates commonly cited around 98–99%, depending on whether the comparison is based on whole-genome alignments or specific gene regions.

• Gorillas are the next closest relatives, but diverged earlier from the human lineage than chimpanzees/bonobos did.

• The overall pattern is that humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos form a clade within the great apes, indicating a single common ancestor within the last several million years.

If you’d like, I can summarize how different studies quantify genetic relatedness (e.g., whole-genome comparisons vs. substitutions-only estimates) and how these numbers are interpreted in terms of evolutionary timing.