quote:
All members of Hominidae except humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans have 24 pairs of chromosomes.[3] Humans have only 23 pairs of chromosomes. Human chromosome 2 is widely accepted to be a result of an end-to-end fusion of two ancestral chromosomes.[4][5]

The evidence for this includes:
The correspondence of chromosome 2 to two ape chromosomes. The closest human relative, the chimpanzee, has near-identical DNA sequences to human chromosome 2, but they are found in two separate chromosomes. The same is true of the more distant gorilla and orangutan.[6][7]
The presence of a vestigial centromere. Normally a chromosome has just one centromere, but in chromosome 2 there are remnants of a second centromere.[8]
The presence of vestigial telomeres. These are normally found only at the ends of a chromosome, but in chromosome 2 there are additional telomere sequences in the middle.[9]

Chromosome 2 presents very strong evidence in favour of the common descent of humans and other apes. According to researcher J. W. IJdo, "We conclude that the locus cloned in cosmids c8.1 and c29B is the relic of an ancient telomere-telomere fusion and marks the point at which two ancestral ape chromosomes fused to give rise to human chromosome 2." [9]

I must admit that this argument appears very convincing on its face, as I read it between appointments anyway, and this is your area... but a cursory google search reveals that it may not be as definitive as represented

The purportedly overwhelming DNA evidence for a fusion event involving two primate chromosomes to form human chromosome 2 does not exist, even without the aid of new analyses. In this report, our review of only the reported data shows that the sequence features encompassing the purported chromosome-2 fusion site are far too ambiguous to infer a fusion event. In addition to a lack of DNA sequence data for a head-to-head chromosomal fusion, there also exists a decided paucity of data to indicate a cryptic centromere. In a companion paper (part 2) to this, we report the results of additional data analyses using a variety of bioinformatic tools and publicly available DNA sequence resources that further refute the hypothetical chromosome fusion model