system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If monkeys are our closest relative, what is our most distant relative? Is there even any way to figure that out?
gpt
Monkeys are not our closest relatives, the chimpanzees are. Like humans, chimps are apes, not monkeys. 
The most distantly-related animals that are currently living are the sponges. The most distantly-related living things are a little bit more difficult to sort out. If you look at mitochondrial DNA, the archaea are most distant. If you look at nuclear DNA, the bacteria are most distant. This is because our nuclear genome is descended directly from the archaea, whereas our mitochondria are literally bacteria. The eukaryotes, of which we are members, were formed through an endosymbiosis event between archaea and bacteria. We could not exist without either of these components, so it is a bit of a philosophical question as to which one we are more closely related to.