When Dr. Jane Goodall’s death was announced on October 1, it marked the passing of one of the modern era’s most influential individuals, one whose ethological discoveries helped shape the science community’s enduring conventional wisdom that human beings and chimpanzees evolved from a common ancestor millions of years ago.

The world-famous British ethologist died at the age of 91 of natural causes, according to the Jane Goodall Institute, which she founded in Washington, D.C. in 1977 to advance public knowledge of her anthropological work and generate support for widespread conservation of natural resources around the world. She earned her Ph.D. in ethology — the study of animal behavior — in 1966 from Cambridge University.

Goodall first came to public attention in 1960 when she described chimpanzees in a Tanzanian wildlife refuge eating meat and making use of tools. Chimps were previously thought to be vegetarians, and their making and using tools was followed by Goodall observing chimps displaying a multitude of other human-like habits and activities, including groups of them making war on other groups.

“The revolutionary discoveries that Dr. Goodall made through her field work with chimpanzees are a wonder of the scientific world. Her findings suggest that many behaviors once thought to be exclusively human may have been inherited from common ancestors that we shared with chimpanzees millions of years ago. The more we discover about these kindred beings, the deeper our insight into what it means to be human,” according to the Jane Goodall Institute.

Her observations of unexpected behavioral likenesses between humans and chimps seemed to be confirmed by evolutionary science in 1975 when Science magazine published “Evolution at Two Levels in Humans and Chimpanzees,” in which pioneering geneticist Mary Claire-King and evolutionary biologist Alan Wilson reported that comparing aligning DNA from each species found 98-99% similarity.

Consequently, to the present day, evolution science holds that humans and chimps must have evolved from a shared ancestor because of the presence of 98-99% DNA similarities. The depth of penetration of the figure in American public culture is seen in this statement of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History:

“DNA is thus especially important in the study of evolution. The amount of difference in DNA is a test of the difference between one species and another — and thus how closely or distantly related they are. While the genetic difference between individual humans today is minuscule — about 0.1 percent on average — study of the same aspects of the chimpanzee genome indicates a difference of about 1.2 percent.”

Similarly, as Evolution News Editor David Klinghoffer points out, the 98-99% commonality claim has been repeated in Science magazine, the National Geographic News, Scientific American, and even the conservative political publication National Review.

But, as geologist and attorney Dr. Casey Luskin describes it, there were legitimate questions about the figure almost from its first appearance in scientific literature. The latest research, as published by the science journal Nature, provides abundant evidence of how far off the 99% figure was from the beginning, including the following:

“At least 12.5 percent and possibly up to 13.3 percent of the chimp and human genomes represent a ‘gap difference’ between the two genomes. That means there’s a ‘gap’ in one genome compared to the other, often where they are so different, they cannot even be aligned.

“There are also significant alignable sections of the two genomes that show ‘short nucleotide variations’ which differ by only about 1.5 percent. We can add this difference to the ‘gap difference,’ and calculate a 14 percent to 14.9 percent total difference between human and chimp genomes. This means that the actual difference between human and chimp DNA is 14 times greater than the often-quoted 1 percent statistic.”

Luskin also points to a peculiar aspect of the new research and how it is presented by Nature:

“One very peculiar thing about the research just published is that nowhere in the technical paper is this bombshell discovery clearly reported, and nowhere is it stated clearly that human and chimp DNA is some ~14 percent different. Even an explainer article in Nature — which usually do a great job of translating technical findings for the average scientist — does not mention this huge finding. You have to dig deep into the Supplementary Data to find it, and even there it is opaquely stated in technical jargon.

“This data has huge implications for the long-quoted statistic that we are only 1 percent genetically different from chimps, and many people are interested in this question for its implications regarding evolution, origins, and the exceptional status of human beings. Yet the papers almost seemed like they want to obscure the numbers, making them hard to find for the reader, whether a scientist or layman.”

Any time a scientific research study buries such key facts about its findings, it’s an indication the authors aren’t in a hurry for readers to realize they are dealing with a bombshell for the conventional wisdom. Honest and courageous scientific method should put the bombshell warning right up front for everybody to see.