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In a subsequent article (in a book called The Great Ape Project), even Diamond concedes the taxonomic priority of Homo over Pan, which would make, at best, chimps the second humans. In fact that is the way Linnaeus had it in 1758: he had split the more anthromorphic descriptions of apes from the less so, and had put the former into Homo troglodytes, and the latter into Simia satyrus. Calling us "the third chimpanzee" is senseless; in fact the original title (in England) of Diamond's book was The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, invoking William Shirer's chronicle of the Reich as a metaphor for the history of the entire species. Apparently that was a bit too misanthropic for the American publisher.
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