Asger Hobolth at North Carolina State University's Bioinformatics Research Center and his team used a hidden Markov model to estimate that chimps and humans diverged from a common ancestor only about 4.1 million years ago. 1 Hobolth looked at the probability distribution of 1.9 billion DNA base pairs across humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, searching for differences in the historical sequences.












