IT WAS a very strange letter from Alan Bourne that you published (Oxford Mail, May 15).

I had to read it several times to try to work out if it was intended as a tongue in cheek joke to stir up debate, or by someone with a closed mind.

I don’t think that there is any longer any doubt that all life is related or that we humans are animals.

In fact, we are so closely related to the chimpanzee – even closer to a chimpanzee than the chimpanzee is to an orang utan – that we are often known as the fifth ape.

Do these facts really matter? They certainly don’t bother me. I just except that this is how things are.

DERRICK HOLT, Headington, Oxford