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Re: offspring, ape and man.
Gautam Majumdar (gautam@majumdar.demon.co.uk)
Tue, 16 Jul 1996 20:56:29 +0100
In article <31EBBF2E.5A13@tip.nl>, Paul Smith <paul.smith@tip.nl>
writes
>Thomas R. Holtz, Jr. wrote:
>>
>> tdewater@aol.com (Tdewater) wrote:
>> >
>> > Is it possiable to mate an ape and a human and have an offspring ? If yes
>> > has it been done and what was the child like ? If one has any data on
>> > this please send it to Tdewater2aol.com and comment here.
>
>I wouldn't lose much sleep over this. I don't know about bonobos but common
>chimpanzees
>have a different number of autosome pairs from humans. This makes little difference
>to
>genetic distance because the difference is either due to fusion or duplication (I forget
>which) since the LCA, but it would play merry hell with meiosis, even assuming that a
>hybrid would be viable. Result: gametes without a viable set of chromosomes and no
>offspring from the hybrid. A similar chromosome mis-match keeps mules sterile
>despite
>the genetic similarity of the parent species.
>
Has anyone attempted in hybridizing Chimpanzee and Gorilla or even
Chimpanzee and Bonobo ? If so, the results may throw some light on
the possibility (purely hypothetical, I must add) of crossing H.sapiens
with one of these species.
[snip]
>
>Paul Smith.
>
--
Gautam Majumdar
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