Court to decide if chimps are people, too

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Chimp-human split
About 6 million years ago, chimpanzees and human ancestors diverged. Chimps went their way, and we began to go ours.

The split led to various differences. For instance, chimps are covered in hair and we are much less so. A chimp's brain is about one-third the size of an average human brain. And we walk upright on two legs, while chimps typically walk on all fours.

"What seems to have happened initially is that our ancestors began walking most of the time upright on two legs," Marks said.

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Along the way, our ancestors shed their thick coats of body hair, which allowed us to disperse body heat differently from chimps. Chimpanzees, like most mammals, pant to keep their bodies from heating up. Humans sweat. Apparently, Marks said, when our ancestors began speaking, their vocal tracts reorganized and that made it difficult to pant.

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Teeth tell a tale, too. Along our evolutionary trek, human ancestors developed much smaller canine teeth, while chimps still sport the dagger-like teeth.

"Male chimpanzees have canine teeth much larger than female chimpanzees," Marks told LiveScience. "That difference doesn't exist in humans. We call our lawyers instead of bearing our canine teeth. And women can call their lawyers just as readily as men can."

Animal rights
Even still, activist Stibbe says the legal standing is the only way to ensure the chimp's survival.

"In his home in the African jungle, he would have been well able to look after himself without a guardian," Stibbe said. "But since he was abducted into an alien environment, traumatized and locked up in an enclosure, it did become necessary for me to act on his behalf to secure the donation money for him and to avoid his deportation."

Marks disputes Stibbe's statement, saying that in nature chimps do have guardians, or other chimps to watch their backs. "That's ridiculous. Chimpanzees are very social creatures," Marks said. "One of the other tragedies of this chimpanzee is it seems to have grown up largely in isolation from other chimpanzees."

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If Matthew the chimp were declared a person, scientists foresee it would open a messy can of worms.

"In general, I don't think that it's a good idea to grant chimpanzees legal human rights," Mitani said. "Chimpanzees are well-known to kill each other. What would we do to perpetrators of those 'crimes?'"

And what about other animals, like dogs and dolphins: A chimp-is-a-person ruling could trigger similar court cases in support of non-human animals getting human status, said Brosnan and other anthropologists.

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