Dale Peterson in his book "Eating Apes" discusses the interconnectedness of us to the great apes. Some startling statistics: "Modern gorilla DNA is 97.7 percent the same as that of humans... And modern chimpanzee and bonobo DNA turns out to be around 98.7 percent identical to that of modern humans.." "And the mere 1.3 percent difference between humans and the chimpanzees and bonobos means that we are actually closer to them than zebras are to horses, or African elephants are to Indian elephants." (italics are mine)
"In more practical terms, those numbers mean that the next time you go to the zoo and wander past cages containing chimpanzees or bonobos, you might pause and look into the eye of a being who will indeed look back; and you should know that you (genetically almost 99 percent chimpanzee) are sharing a gaze with someone who is, according to the best measurement, almost 99 percent human. You are on one side of the bars, the chimps and bonobos on the other side, simply because those apes lack a little more than 1 percent of the requisite genes to be treated like humans. And if you linger to gaze at gorillas in the same zoo, remember that they are sitting on the other side of the bars or the moat not because they have done anything wrong, but simply and solely because they happen to be missing just slightly more than a percent of the human genome."
