Re: Did humans and chimps once interbreed?

Marc wrote:
c'bert wrote:
http://tinyurl.com/gea6o
17 May 2006
From New Scientist Print Edition


The Nature web site has the article in it's Advance Online
Publication section, this is the abstract:

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Genetic evidence for complex speciation of humans and chimpanzees

Nick Patterson, Daniel J. Richter, Sante Gnerre, Eric S. Lander
and David Reich

The genetic divergence time between two species varies substantially
across the genome, conveying important information about the timing
and process of speciation. Here we develop a framework for studying
this variation and apply it to about 20 million base pairs of aligned
sequence from humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and more distantly
related primates. Human-chimpanzee genetic divergence varies from
less than 84% to more than 147% of the average, a range of more
than 4 million years. Our analysis also shows that human-chimpanzee
speciation occurred less than 6.3 million years ago and probably more
recently, conflicting with some interpretations of ancient fossils.
Most strikingly, chromosome X shows an extremely young genetic
divergence time, close to the genome minimum along nearly its
entire length. These unexpected features would be explained if
the human and chimpanzee lineages initially diverged, then later
exchanged genes before separating permanently.

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It seems that somebody just couldn't leave their chimp alone.

NashtOn, what are your thoughts about this?
It's in your genes you know.


(signed) marc


There's a chimp in his/her jeans? Sounds personal to me.

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