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How are humans more closely related to Neanderthals than to chimpanzees?

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A diagram showing the hierarchy of animal classification in taxonomy, with colored boxes arranged from broadest to most specific: domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. — taxonomy Animals and other organisms are classified within a succession of nested groups that ranges from the general to the particular.

In the field of taxonomy, humans are considered more closely related to Neanderthals than to chimpanzees because of the timing of their respective evolutionary divergences.

Phylogenetics uses branching diagrams, or cladograms, to depict these relationships based on common ancestry. The common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals lived approximately 500,000 to 700,000 years ago. In contrast, the lineages leading to modern humans and chimpanzees diverged much earlier, between 6.5 million and 9.3 million years ago.123

Because humans and Neanderthals share a more recent common ancestor, they exhibit a higher degree of genetic similarity. Modern humans and Neanderthals share approximately 99.5 to 99.9 percent of their genome sequence, whereas humans and chimpanzees share about 98 to 99 percent. Furthermore, while chimpanzees are classified in a separate genus (Pan), Neanderthals are often grouped within the same genus as humans (Homo) and are sometimes even classified as a subspecies of Homo sapiens due to evidence of past interbreeding.23456