It seems weird to me that we'd share more DNA with chimpanzees, but orangutans would physically look more like us. For example, they have hair lines, they have more similar molar teeth, more differentiated left and right brain hemispheres than other hominids, similar shoulder blades, similar cartilage-to-bone ratio in forearms, hair more similar to us, breasts more similar, and scores of other physical similarities (most of those on this list were referenced here:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/orangutans-human-relative-evolution)
They refer to the past in their vocalizations (no other animal seems to do that besides them and us):
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau3401And, while I know this is not remotely scientific, they come across as less "wild" than gorillas and chimpanzees to me.
Are some of these things just convergent evolution? Or are they things chimpanzees and gorillas lost? But why? Orangutans still live in trees. What good does a hair line do for an animal in a tree? Perhaps to see better as they swing between branches? Then why did we keep our hairlines as well?
Could it be that orangutans have evolved more slowly than other hominids, meaning perhaps they are the most physically similar to that the last common ancestor for all five great apes? (obviously counting bonobos as a separate species here)
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-funded-scientists-publish-orangutan-genome-sequencehttps://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110126131536.htm"'In terms of evolution, the orangutan genome is quite special among great apes in that it has been extraordinarily stable over the past 15 million years,' says senior author Richard K. Wilson, PhD, director of Washington University's Genome Center, which led the project. 'This compares with chimpanzees and humans, both of which have experienced large-scale structural rearrangements of their genome that may have accelerated their evolution.'
[...]
'If you are editing a book on your computer, you can highlight a paragraph and copy and paste it, delete it or invert it,' Wilson explains. 'Duplications, deletions and inversions of DNA are types of structural variations. When we look at the genomes of humans and chimps, we see an acceleration of structural changes over the course of evolutionary history. But for whatever reason, orangutans did not participate in that acceleration, and that was a surprise.'"
So perhaps it's simply that orangutans have changed less than gorillas and chimpanzees have with respect to the common ancestor of all the great apes?
Or maybe I'm completely wrong, and I'm imagining that orangutans look and behave closer to humans than other great apes. I probably shouldn't be excluding bonobos in this, since they also have much closer temperaments, and with their less stocky build seems closer to us than other great apes as well.
But intuitively speaking — and you could certainly make a more evidence based argument on this as well — orangutans seems to appear to be more human than other great apes, and yet are our most genetically distant relations among the great apes. What are the reasons for this?