By modern biology's definition, you are an ape
Apes lack tails because of a mutation in a single gene, TBXT. Biologists once used the word for every hominoid except humans, but a consistent family tree cannot leave us out, so many now count people as apes. Strictly, the same logic makes apes a kind of monkey too.
Hominoidea, the apes, are Old World primates native to sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, though in prehistory they ranged across Europe as well, and one member, humans, now lives everywhere. They sit closer to Old World monkeys than to New World ones. The superfamily splits into two living branches. Gibbons, the lesser apes, number 20 species in four genera, all Asian, light-bodied tree dwellers that walk upright on the ground. The great apes include three orangutan species, two gorillas, two chimpanzees and ourselves.
Most apes except gorillas and humans climb nimbly, and plant foods such as fruit, leaves, nuts and roots dominate their diets. Every non-human ape is rare and at risk of extinction, chiefly from habitat loss, with hunting and, for African great apes, the Ebola virus adding to the danger.
The word has wandered. Old English apa is of uncertain origin and first meant any non-human primate, as related Germanic words still do. After monkey entered English, ape narrowed to the tailless, especially human-like kinds, though the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica still listed both senses. Everyday speech adds more confusion, calling tailless macaques such as the Barbary ape apes. John Edward Gray coined hominoid in 1825 and hominin a year earlier.
Primatologists like Wilfrid Le Gros Clark once lined primates up in an ascending series from monkeys through apes to humans, an arrangement that excluded people and was therefore paraphyletic. Modern taxonomy prefers complete branches, so writers such as Benton in 2005 list humans among the apes. Dates have shifted too. The human split was once put at 15 to 20 million years ago, with Ramapithecus cast as an ancestor, until fossils linked it to orangutans and biochemistry moved the common ancestor with chimpanzees to between 5 and 10 million years ago, likely nearer the recent end.
Source: Ape
