On the morning of June 2, 2012, in a shelter for retired (circus, laboratory, space) monkeys in Texas, in his favorite hammock, one of the oldest chimpanzees in captivity, a male named Oliver, was found dead. He was at least 55 years old and before the orphanage he lived with circus performers, artists and pharmacologists.
He was taken away from his mother early and completely socialized with people: he loved to walk on his hind legs and do housework - and did not know how to talk with other chimpanzees. He was physiologically unusual, with no hair on his chest and head, and generally looked "too human." The ears were human-like, the eyes were lighter, and the lower jaw was heavier than usual in monkeys.
Oliver was born in Congo and was sold to South African animal trainers Franuk and Janet Burger in the early 1970s. In his youth, he, as it turned out, does not communicate with other chimpanzees, preferring to communicate with people. He always walked upright and learned how to use the toilet.
Its owners found that he was helping his owners, pushing a wheelbarrow and preparing food for the dogs. Oliver also enjoys relaxing, watching TV and drinking Seven-Up and whiskey.
The fun in the Burger family ended the moment Oliver reached puberty. Female chimpanzees did not attract him, he laid his eyes on his wife Burger.
The sly man waited until his husband was at home, ran up to Burger's wife, climbed under her skirt, showing quite obvious signs of sexual arousal. Usually the wife managed to fight off the animal, but one night (the husband was not at home) Oliver burst into the poor woman's bedroom, tore off her shirt, and tried to rape. She was saved by a miracle.
After that, Oliver was transferred for research to a medical laboratory in Pennsylvania, where, after several attempts to rape female personnel, and severe punishments for this, he switched his interest to female chimpanzees, got himself a harem of seven monkeys and gave birth to numerous offspring.
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There were widespread rumors that Oliver was a mutant chimpanzee or even a human-chimpanzee hybrid, perhaps the result of some kind of secret genetic experiment.
Several news reports indicated that Oliver had 47 chromosomes, one less than chimpanzees and one more than humans. Some people have argued that Oliver did not have the typical chimpanzee odor.
In 1997, a series of genetic tests seemed to have resolved the question of who Oliver was. Geneticists at the University of Chicago have determined that Oliver is just a chimpanzee and has no missing link, and of course he is not a human-chimpanzee hybrid. He also, they said, possessed a standard chimpanzee chromosome count of 48. Thus, the report of 47 chromosomes was either misinterpretation or deliberate distortion of facts.
Scientists planned further tests to find a genetic explanation for Oliver's unusual appearance and behavior. Other upright chimpanzees have appeared elsewhere. Presumably, Oliver may have been part of these species. But since then, there has been no more data on these studies.
In 2006, the Discovery Channel aired the Oliver documentary, Oliver The Chimp, and interest in the story grew again.
Are human-animal hybrids possible?
Chimpanzees and humans are very closely related genetically (95% of the chemical elements that make up DNA and 99% of DNA bonds coincide), which made it possible to express the disputed opinion that a hybrid of a human and a monkey is possible. Moreover, today there is not a single officially registered copy of such a hybrid. The percentage of coincidence of the constituent genomes of humans and chimpanzees, as well as the conclusions from such a match, are constantly disputed. In addition, the bases of views of the supporters of evolution and creationists, as you know, do not coincide, so everything that is proved by evolutionists is an empty phrase for creationists, and vice versa.
At the same time, little or much means such similarity of genomes is not initially clear. If we compare the DNA of different people, it turns out that they differ from each other by only 0.1%, that is, only every thousandth nucleotide is different for us, and the remaining 99.9% coincide. Moreover, if we compare all the diversity of DNA of representatives of various races and peoples, it turns out that people differ much less than chimpanzees in one herd. This means that someone who has never known humans or chimpanzees before will first learn to distinguish chimpanzees from each other, and only then humans.
You remember - you cannot help but remember - the plot of the novel "Heart of a Dog", written by Mikhail Bulgakov in 1925. Was it only the genius of the writer who suggested the possibility of an unprecedented experiment - an operation to transplant the human pituitary gland and testicles to a dog? Ideas about such a possibility wandered in scientific circles and excited the thoughts of citizens who had nothing to do with science. What happened in reality?
Russian biologist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov (1870-1932) began his work in the field of artificial insemination. As a result, he developed a technology that allowed one stud stallion to breed up to 500 mares (versus 20-30 naturally). Horse breeders from all over the world came to the Central Experimental Station about the breeding of domestic animals in Moscow, to Ivanov.
But Ivanov's work on artificial insemination was not limited to mares. He was the first to breed and study hybrids of zebra and donkey, bison and domestic cow, antelope and cow, mouse and rat, mouse and guinea pig, guinea pig and rabbit, rabbit and hare, and others. Genetics at that time in Russia was not yet outlawed, and Ivanov's works were considered very important, they are carried out to this day by his followers.
And in 1910, speaking at a congress of zoologists in Graz, Ivanov described the possibility of obtaining a hybrid of chimpanzees and humans. But it was only in 1924 that Ivanov, working in Paris at the Pasteur Institute, finally received permission to conduct such experiments, for which he went to Kindia (French Guinea), but went to Kindia two years later, when the Soviet government transferred the necessary amount to him for experiments worth $ 10,000.
A month spent at the station in Kindia did not give any results - there were no sexually mature chimpanzees there. But they were found in Canakri (also French Guinea). It is here that for the first time in human history artificial insemination with human sperm of three female chimpanzees was officially registered. None of them got pregnant.
Then Ivanov proposes to do the opposite - to inseminate several women with the sperm of a male chimpanzee, for which, naturally, he does not receive permission from the local authorities. But he receives it three years later, in Sukhumi, and even finds five women volunteers. The only monkey suitable for maturity, the orangutan, dies at the beginning of the experiment, and by the time a new batch of chimpanzees arrives in Sukhumi, Ivanov's geneticist is arrested in the course of political cleansing.
Two years later, he will die of a stroke in Alma-Ata, where he worked in his specialty, but did not have the opportunity to conduct his experiments on breeding ape-man. This is the official part of the science of breeding Humanzee.
Nevertheless, Peter Damiani (1006 or 1007-1072), scientist, church doctor, cardinal, left records about Count Gulilmus, whose wife was the mistress of a monkey, who once became jealous of the count for his wife and killed him on this basis. Damiani allegedly heard this story of Pope Alexander II, who also said that the Countess gave birth to a child from a monkey named (or nickname?) "Maimo". Maimo outwardly looked like a normal person, but his intellectual level corresponded to the normal development of a monkey.
During World War II, similar experiments were attributed to the Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele ("Angel of Death from Auschwitz"), because he showed female prisoners photographs of chimpanzees and told them that these were the males whose sperm they were inseminated. But, since such experiments did not fit into the general concept of his inhuman work on eugenics, and there are no records left to confirm them, it is believed that there were no such experiments, and women were subjected to sophisticated psychological torture.
The ancient Greek mathematician Thales once advised his master not to trust unmarried shepherds to graze his flock of sheep, they say, "what if a centaur is born?" In the mythology of Ancient Greece, the attitude of people of those times to the cohabitation of man and animal was reflected - it was not considered incredible. In particular, Aphrodite was engaged in love with lions and stallions, and the wife of the ruler of Crete, Minos, fell in love with the bull to such an extent that she gave birth to the very Minotaur from him.
The Christian religion already clearly and specifically prohibited copulation with animals, but it could not control one hundred percent of the implementation of this prohibition - that is why the people of the Renaissance believed that most of the monsters occurred as a result of the copulation of women and animals. Both Paracelsus and the Italian Lyceti tell about the offspring resulting from such copulation, and the great anatomist Bartholin even claims that he himself saw a woman who, after intercourse with a cat, gave birth to a child with a cat's head.
Isn't that true? We do not know. But I don't want to believe in such a truth.
