Re: "Early humans, chimps were mates"
- From: "retardsman" <remarksman@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 17 May 2006 19:03:10 -0700
ddnoe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Apparently the idea of romance blossoming between humans and our
closest kin isn't so off-the-wall. At least not according to this
article from Men's News Daily.
that explains a LOT about some folks at MND
gone-zoo tho, eh, he'd still have to BUY "favors" from the chimpettes!
some guys get no luck . . . . .
oh . . . HI DENISE!! long time no chitchat!
__________
Denise Denise
I'm so in love with yooooou!
(Randy and the Rainbows)
The Australian - Science & nature
Early humans, chimps were mates
Leigh Dayton, Science writer
May 18, 2006
BEFORE they went their separate evolutionary ways, the ancestors of
chimpanzees and people got up to plenty of, well, monkey business.
Moreover, this went on for about four million years.
The most detailed analysis conducted of human and chimpanzee DNA
reveals that after an initial separation from a common ancestor,
between five and six million years ago, the species continued
interbreeding.
The implication is that speciation - the separation from a common
ancestor - wasn't the simple process scientists previously believed.
Instead, it happened over millions of years during which "episodes" of
hybridisation took place before the final separation into two distinct
species, US researchers claim in a paper published online by Nature.
"For the first time, we're able to see the details written out in the
DNA," said biologist Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "What they tell
us at the least is that the human-chimp speciation was very unusual."
According to Dr Lander and colleagues at Harvard University, they
didn't expect to find evidence of human-chimp hybrids. "Hybridisation
is commonly observed to play a role in speciation in plants, but
evolutionary biologists do not generally view it as an important way to
produce a new species in animals," said team leader Nick Patterson, a
biostatistician at the Broad Institute.
Geneticist David Reich, of Harvard Medical School, added: "That such
evolutionary events have not been seen more often in animal species may
simply be due to the fact that we have not been looking for them."
While some experts in human evolution remain sceptical of some of the
details, they are impressed nevertheless.
"It's a totally cool and extremely clever analysis," said Harvard
biological anthropologist Daniel Lieberman, who was not involved in the
research.
"My problem is imagining what it would be like to have a bipedal
hominid and a chimpanzee viewing each other as appropriate mates, not
to put it too crudely," he said.
Previous studies comparing human and chimp DNA have offered an estimate
of how long ago the two species split by averaging the amount of
divergence in their genes. Those studies come up with a figure of about
seven million years.
But thanks to the completion of the chimpanzee genome project in
September, the team had about 800 times more data.
That meant they were able to look at how specific sections of the
genetic code evolved.
For one thing, the new data suggest the human-chimp split was much
closer to the present than the seven-million-years date that fossils
and previous studies indicated - certainly no earlier than 6.3 million
years ago, and more likely around 5.4million.
The data also show that the human-chimp split probably took four
million years. That's because in some parts of the DNA sequence, the
genetic difference between humans and chimps is so large that those
genes must have been isolated from each other nearly 10 million years
ago.
But in other places, the human and chimp lines are so close that they
appear to have still been swapping genetic material at least until 6.3
million years ago. One of those areas is the x-chromosome. Female
chimps and humans have two x-chromosomes, while males have an x and a
y.
"The genes that are a barrier to speciation tend to be on the
x-chromosome," team member Assistant Professor Reich said.
But as interbreeding is known to place strong selective pressures on
sex chromosomes, that would explain the discovery that the x-chromosome
is some 1.2 million years younger than the rest of human chromosomes,
the team suggested.
Additional reporting: AP
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