Sarich and Wilson used the method to show that approximately the same amount of change had occurred in albumin in both the human (Homo sapiens) and chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) lineages since their common ancestor.
When calibrated with well-attested fossil evidence (for example, no Primates of modern aspect before the K-T boundary), this led them to argue that the human-chimp split had occurred only ~5 million years ago (which was much younger than previously supposed by paleontologists).
[4] Using 4 carnivore species as outgroups, they showed that humans (with much longer generation times) had not accumulated significantly fewer (or greater) molecular changes than had other primates in their sample (e.g., rhesus monkeys, spider monkeys, and various prosimians all of which have much shorter generation times).
However, a famous experiment comparing eleven genes between mice or rats to humans, with pig, cow, goat, dog, and rabbits acting as an outgroup reference, suggested that rodents had faster mutation rates.
This theory was supported through testing coding regions and untranslated regions with the relative rate test (which showed that rodents had a mutation rate much higher than humans) and backed up by comparing paralogous genes because they are homologous via gene duplication and not speciation and so the comparison is independent of the time of divergence.
He did this via the relative rate test and then, using this data, he was able to construct a phylogeny using various methods, including parsimony and maximum likelihood.
[6] He took the same approach in another experiment to compare humans to other primates, and found no significant difference in evolutionary rates.