Oh my. The Australian newspaper down under cuts right to the chase with a hed that dare not speak its name, “Early Humans had sex with chimps,” over a story by Agence France-Presse’s Richard Ingham. Hmmpppph. Everybody’s having fun with this one. When Harvard and MIT PhD’s nod their heads yes, could be, sort of, to such a thing, that’s news. Genetic and paleontological studies for a decade or two have implied that the hominid lineage, with humans its sole survivor, emerged from the chimpanzee lineage maybe 6 million years back. A new, detailed study of fossils and especially genes of modern humans and chimps, published in Nature, suggests it was no clean split. More of a long messy breakup, one might say, with at least one hot and heavy reconciliation along the way.The blurred period of criss-crossed lineages could have persisted for as long as 4 million years. The Boston Globe’s Gareth Cook writes that some paleoanthropologists have a hard time imagining courtship “between early human ancestors, which walked upright, and the chimpanzee ancestors, which walked on all fours.” AP’s Matt Crenson nails it: “Breakup Sex.”
Stories:
Boston Globe Gareth Cook; AP Matt Crenson; Reuters; NYTimes Nicholas Wade; SF Chronicle David Perlman; AFP Richard Ingham; Scripps Howard Lee Bowman; Washington Post David Brown; NPR (audio) Christopher Joyce; National Geographic News Brian Handwerk;
Grist for the Mill: Broad Institute Press Release.
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