It’s not a stretch to think that bonobos and humans are closely related, according to a team of researchers who studied the animal’s muscle structures.

Bernard Wood, a professor of human origins, and a team of researchers from GW and Howard University studied the muscle structure of seven deceased bonobos from the Antwerp Zoo in Belgium and found physiological evidence that bonobos might be more closely related to humans than chimpanzees, according to a University release.

“Bonobo muscles have changed least, which means they are the closest we can get to having a ‘living’ ancestor,” Wood said in the release.

The study found that humans are more related to bonobos than chimpanzees because bonobos’ muscle structure has evolved less over time, the release said.

When examining the functions of different muscles in bonobos and humans, the researchers found that bonobo muscles had not changed as much as common chimpanzees since the evolutionary split between the two species about two million years ago.

Researchers said that by studying the differences between humans and our closest evolutionary ancestor, scientists may gain a greater understanding of human health that can lead to medical breakthroughs.

Previous studies have examined DNA evidence to study how closely humans are related to other primates, but this is the first study to look at the muscle structure of the three species, according to the release.

Rui Diego, an associate professor of anatomy at Howard University and lead author of the study, said the research shows a “mosaic evolution” between the three species, meaning that certain traits are shared by different combinations of the species.

“Such a mosaic anatomical evolution may well be related to the somewhat similar molecular mosaic evolution between the three species revealed by previous genetic studies: each of the chimpanzees species share about 3 percent of genetic traits with humans that are not present in the other chimpanzee species,” Diego said in the release.