“After humans and chimpanzees went their separate ways along the evolutionary ladder, they continued to enter into intimate relationships for another 4 million years,” says MIT Dr. David Reich. “Moreover, they had common descendants
The researcher and his colleagues made such a sensational conclusion by studying the genes of our ancestors. It turned out that the newborn babies did not form a separate species, since they were not able to produce offspring from each other. But hybrids could give birth from both humans and chimpanzees. And the skull of one of them, about 7 million years old, was found several years ago in Africa. Archaeologists named it Tumai.
“The presence of Tumai's humanoid traits suggests that the division of humans and chimpanzees into species went on for a long time and included episodes of hybridization between nascent species,” another research participant, Nick Patterson, confirms Reich's statement.
Consequences of "love"
- Humanity has paid for "incest", - believes the doctor of medical sciences, head of the department of the Center for Genetic Research Anton Kryukov. - Many scientists believe, although they prefer not to spread about it, that cancer and AIDS are terrible consequences of "love" between humans and apes.
So American scientists from the University of Alabama were able to finally confirm that the primary source of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS was chimpanzees living on the banks of the Sanaga River in Cameroon (West Africa). The first person known to have contracted HIV was from Kinshasa, the capital of the Congo, near Cameroon. His blood was saved for medical research in 1959 - decades before scientists knew about AIDS.
According to the official version, the pioneer of immunodeficiency suffered from the bite of a female chimpanzee. He got infected himself and passed the virus to his wife, who - to her children. As a result, the infection came to the city, where it spread. And according to an unofficial version, burdened by mass rumors, the African became infected after having sex with monkeys.
- Intimate relationships with shaggy brothers and sisters in mind, widespread at the dawn of evolution, could make modern people very vulnerable to genetic diseases, continues Anton Petrovich. - And, probably, genes have greatly spoiled us. For example, the study showed that the X chromosome (women have two, and men have one) - the youngest part of the genome - was mutated during those four million years of "incest" and hybridization. As a result, both humans and chimpanzees have accumulated an equal number of disadvantageous mutations - 140,000 each in some DNA regions. They also made our species more susceptible to diseases based on genetic causes. And the worst of them is cancer.
Secret plan
Still not understanding the consequences of bestiality, scientists themselves tried to cross people and monkeys. It is known that in 1926, Stalin supported a secret plan to create in the laboratory creatures with incredible strength and an underdeveloped brain, insensitive to pain, hardy and unpretentious in food. It was assumed that it would be possible to grow a "living war machine", and at the same time a "workhorse", which could be exploited without high costs in coal mines, on construction in Siberia and the Arctic regions. The question of the use of creatures born in the laboratory as a source of organs was also considered.
The task was entrusted to the famous scientist Ilya Ivanov, who by that time had extensive experience in crossing various types of animals. At the experimental station "Askania-Nova" in the Crimea, the "Soviet Frankenstein" bred zebroids, reindeer, oryx, half-breed bison. He crossed a white mouse with a guinea pig, a brown hare with a rabbit, and got a rat-mouse offspring. But all these hybrids that did not exist in living nature were only a prelude to the implementation of the crazy idea of getting offspring from humans and monkeys.
If you transplant 5-6 human genes into an animal, then its organs can be used for transplantation to humans.
African passion
The project of the scientist Ivanov, the details of which Russian historians disclosed 80 years later, also received approval from the Pasteur Institute in Paris. The French ceded their research center in Kindia (New Guinea) to Moscow, where work on artificial insemination and experiments with animal cells had already been carried out.
Ivanov, who knew nothing about genetic differences, tried to fertilize female chimpanzees and gorillas with human sperm. And vice versa - African women have monkey sperm. Test subjects - both females and women - were euthanized before the injection. And the offspring seemed to … appear.
Here is what Ilya Ivanovich himself wrote to his Moscow friends (in the 1930s they all disappeared without a trace): “A hybrid“man”that corresponds to anthropoids, from birth grows faster than an ordinary person, by the age of three or four he is gaining incredible strength, much less sensitive to pain, indiscriminate in food, of all the fun prefers sexual pleasure. Its most important advantage over living beings, including "man", is ease of management and impeccable obedience. The possibilities of use are endless - from working in damp mines to military service. " Although it is possible that the scientist presented only ideas.
In 1929, it was decided to create a monkey nursery in the USSR itself. It was opened in Sukhumi, Georgia. Pregnant chimpanzees and already born cubs were allegedly sent there from Africa. But on the way, they died of an unknown disease, which in its symptoms resembled … the current AIDS.
Ivanov was suspected of sabotage. In December 1930 he was arrested and given five years in the camps. And on March 20, 1932, the professor died under unknown circumstances. The obituary was signed by the great Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov.
“They say that the arrest and death of Ivanov was preceded by a rather strange incident,” says Dr. Kryukov. - One of the employees escaped from the Sukhumi nursery at night, releasing the remaining hybrids. After that, curious stories appeared. Old people from Georgia and Abkhazia said that even after the Second World War, one could meet “wild people like big monkeys” in the mountains. Maybe they were hybrids escaped from the nursery, living out their days in freedom?
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Chimeras from test tubes
“Ivanov’s research was, of course, extreme,” says Dr. Kryukov. - Only the development of genetics made it possible to carry out such experiments more delicately - in test tubes. The first attempt to create a hybrid between humans and animals occurred in 1996, when a geneticist from Massachusetts Jose Sibelli, swiping a cotton swab over his mouth, extracted DNA molecules and placed them in a cow's egg, from which all DNA had previously been removed. The experiment was interrupted a week later, Sibelli said at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC on cloning. Most scientists agreed that if the fetus were allowed to develop normally and be born, it would look like a human, but some the characteristics of the cells would most likely change slightly. He would have a cow's energy elements of cells - mitochondria, since their genetic material is contained just in the shell of the egg.
Pig by 5 percent
For example, the scientific world learned about Sibelli's attempt only two years later, when the biotechnology firm Advanced Cell Technology, which funded him, tried to obtain a patent for an invention.
Thanks to the patent office, it became known about the independently undertaken by biotechnology firms - American and Australian - an attempt to connect a man with a pig. As the scientists themselves stated in their patent applications, they grew a human pig embryo to 32 cells before destroying it. If left to develop, he would be 95 percent human. But, of course, no one knows what this person would be like.
“Scientists are not trying to develop these hybrids for the sake of sports interest,” sums up Dr. Kryukov. - If you transplant 5-6 human genes into an animal, then its organs can be used for transplantation to a person, and they will not be rejected by the body. In general, today the goal of such experiments is not to remove chimeras, but to find new ways of treating diseases.
Are the experiments continuing in the Congo?
At the beginning of this year, an interesting message went unnoticed on the news feeds. In the Republic of the Congo, very large ape-like creatures have been found that do not look like gorillas or chimpanzees. So far, scientists have only a few images, as is usually the case in such cases, fuzzy video footage and testimony. From all this it follows: the discovered creatures are distinguished by fair growth (about five centimeters taller than the average gorilla), they have flatter muzzles than most other primates, and their behavior also differs from that of other higher apes. In particular, they move vertically and on two legs, and often sleep in large ground nests (while chimpanzees usually settle in trees to avoid falling prey to predatory animals). Besides,unknown creatures have a strange habit of greeting the rising and setting of the moon with loud, triumphant cries, without fear - unlike chimpanzees - to attract lions and hyenas.
According to professor at Georgia State University Duane Rambeau, this is either a really new species, or a new subspecies, or - most interestingly - some kind of hybrid. Scientists have found that their mothers are female chimpanzees. Who are the fathers? Are human-animal sexual experiences still going on in the wilds of Africa? Or are these creatures descendants of those hybrids bred by Ivanov and escaped from him?
OPINION OF A GENETIC
Director of the Medical Genetic Research Center of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences Vladimir IVANOV:
- All information about the alleged results of successful crossing of humans with great apes (with gorillas first of all) and obtaining viable offspring from them do not have a single scientific confirmation.
OPINION OF THE VETERINARIAN
Doctor of Agricultural Sciences, Professor Boris GALUTSKY:
- We have 46 chromosomes, and chimpanzees have 48. Theoretically, a hybrid with 47 chromosomes can be born. But because of the odd number of chromosomes, such a creature will be sterile. Hence, it cannot give offspring. It is known that, for example, zebroids - hybrids of a domestic horse and a zebra - remained sterile. And from a domestic horse with 64 chromosomes and a donkey with 62, a sterile mule is born. At the beginning of the last century, genetics was in its infancy. And science did not know that during hybridization, not only the number and shape of chromosomes are important, but also the set of genes carried by the parents. Indeed, each chromosome contains a huge number of genes. In addition, testosterone cannot be compared to chimpanzees and humans: they have different hormones, different immune systems. If it were that simple, it would be possible to take chimpanzee organs and transplant them to humans.