Good morning.
Chimp-human breakup may have been long, messy affair, says new study
– Mounds of new data suggest drama involved time apart and even a couple of final rendezvousCopyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
NEW YORK – One of the most detailed comparisons yet of human and chimp DNA shows that the split between the two species was a long, complicated affair that may even have featured an evolutionary version of breakup sex.
Previous research has shown chimpanzees and humans are sister species, split from a common ancestor about 7 million years ago. The new study goes further by looking at about 800 times more DNA than earlier efforts. That extra data make it possible to determine when and how the split happened.
“For the first time, we’re able to see the details written out in the DNA,” said Eric Lander, one of the collaborators on the study. “What they tell us at the least is that the human-chimp speciation was very unusual.”
Unusual, indeed. The researchers, from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, propose that humans and chimpanzees first split up about 10 million years ago. Then, after evolving in different directions for about 4 million years, they got back together for a brief fling that produced a third, hybrid population with characteristics of both lines.
That genetic collaboration then gave rise to two separate branches — one leading to humans and the other to chimps.
The work has inspired both admiration and skepticism. Many paleontologists have a hard time believing some of the humans that are known to have lived during that era could have been pairing up with apes.
“It’s a totally cool and extremely clever analysis,” said Daniel Lieberman, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard who wasn’t involved in the study. “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.” (Story.)
I’ll go first.
* Maybe this proves that beer was invented millions of years earlier than we thought.
:xpost:
testing 
“What was I supposed to do? Sheep were still a few million years away in the evolution process!”
I don’t see why early man would shun a chimp as a potential mate. After all, in places in the upper Midwest, the sheep are very nervous.
I like your beer postulate.
Aloha,
Jeff
Hehe… This explains the evolutionary branch that lead to the North Carolina Redneck, huh?
I know where you live, boy. And I saw plenty in your neck of the woods to make the redneckest part of this state look like SoHo.
LOL!!! You’re right! This area is crawling with ’em. fortunately, not all of us fit the description. Yep, WNY is full of ’em.
Y’know, you’re getting quite defensive after asking for jokes. LOL.
Gives new meaning to the phrase “monkey business,” eh?