Oh, now this is really cool. There’s a new site available that lets you find out the divergence times for a whole lot of different species (anything that there is DNA sequence data available for, really – it’s based on published data & gives the references along with results). It’s called Time Tree, & it strikes me as a really useful tool for using when talking about evolutionary relationships. Easy to use; just don’t let it think for you 🙂 I tried ‘chimpanzee’ & ‘human’ for my first search, & TimeTree initially wanted to compare humans to chimp pinworms, which are an intestinal parasite. Which would also give an interesting result – one with a much greater divergence time than my original chimp/human pairing, which comes in at between 5.78 & 7.28 million years ago. (Thanks to ERV for the original link.)
I could spend a lot of time there, but I really should get back to my marking…