OK, this is kinda icky to think about, I know…
But given the kinks which people have, don’t you think it’s awful likely that people have, in fact, had sex with chimps and/or bonobos? Don’t you think it’s likely that we’d know if they were fertile matings?
Don’t you think it’s even more likely that **ted **was the offspring of one of those matings?
This comes up a lot, and it seems to make sense, but I’m not so sure. Fully grown chimps, even females, are nothing to be fooled around with (if you get my meaning). It almost certainly wouldn’t have happened in the wild.
It sure would be an interesting experiment, though. * In vitro*, that is. Might be better to try to hybridize a gorilla and chimp to avoid some of the moral issues. Still, both are endangered, so there’s an ethical issue there as well.
Hybrid ape offspring of a mating of gibbon and siamang
So substantial chromosomal differences are clearly not enough to prevent hybridization in this case. This implies a bonobo/human hybrid would be theorectically possible.
Given the sexual proclivities of humans, and that apes have often been raised as pets from infancy, it’s quite possible, even likely, that matings have taken place from time to time. However, it may not have been frequent enough to rule out hybridization being possible, especially if the interfertility rate was very low. And it might be possible in vitro instead if not in vivo.
On the other hand, non-human apes have some pretty substantial morphological differences to humans; differences in development rates of different body parts could cause a fetus to be inviable.
Can you fix your link? I’m very interested in reading that article, but the link doesn’t work. Thanks.
Sorry.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/205/4403/308
However, all it is is an abstract.
Ah, you already quoted the whole thing. I should be able to find this at the library, though. Thanks.
Sixteen years later, and after a discussion on another thread that risked becoming a hijack I found this the ideal thread to ask: have bonobos and chimps been crossed on purpose, perhaps even under controlled conditions? Are the hybrids viable and fertile? And have they been mixed after birth in the wild or in captivity, meaning has a bonobo baby been raised by a chimpanzee community or a chimp baby been raised by a bonobo community? If so: how did that turn out? Can chimps learn to be “peaceful” and bonobos be culturally taught to be “agressive”? Or is the genetic component too strong?
I know that the words peaceful and aggresive are crude simplifications, but I hope the gist of the question is clear.
Yes, on a couple occassions in captivity. They were viable, I don’t know that anyone tried to breed them again. Often this was done by people who don’t know the difference (circuses, etc).
Their ranges do not overlap in the wild.
There have been mixed groups of bonobos and chimps in captivity. However, bonobo and chimp groups in captivity are extremely different from their groups in the wild. Both species live in groups that tend to split and re-fuse based on availability of resources. The small sub-groups are on the same scale as a troop of chimps you’d see at the zoo, but the larger group can number in the many dozens. And much of the aggressive behavior in chimps occurs when these sub-groups meet. So we really cannot use the behavior of these animals in captivity to make determinations about these questions.
However, I will note the same thing that I noted before: chimps and bonobos share an ancestor an evolutionary eyeblink away. Whether that ancestor lived in groups that were more like a bonobo’s or more like a chimp’s, a subset of the population did successfully transition to the other social style. To me, this conclusively proves that this shift is possible in these animals.
It is evident that the shift is possible in evolutionary timeframes. But is it possible from one generation to the next, by cultural change? If yes: to what extent? That will not be easy to examine, I would even say that the kind of experiments I mentioned with baby-swapping would be immoral when done on purpose, particularly in the wild, where they would be most relevant. I hope no ethics commmission would allow them. And when done accidentally, like in the ciscusses you mention, they are probably scientifically worthless for lack of duly recorded data, not to mention the artificial environement.
Still, if those experiments had been done and the data were available today I would be curious about the results. I suspect that the genetic component of behaviour is stronger than the cultural one, but that some generations of selective breeding would suffice to change the genetics. No million year would be required. Like the foxes bred for tameness in the Soviet Union, selection can be very quick, specially when guided by human intention, though that story is reportedly not as straight forward as people believe. Still, since being domesticated all of our pets and farm animals have changed a lot more than humans have in the same time.
The divergence time is about 1/3 as long as human divergence. That’s rather more than an eyeblink.
There’s certainly some genetic contribution to the behavioral differences between chimps and bonobos.
An experiment like the one you describe is indeed probably impossible. However, smaller scale experiments do seem to show that evolution can occur remarkably fast, even in nature.
The book below outlines the case, but here’s the story.
The Caribbean is full of anole lizards in all shapes and sizes. Big dull colored ones who hang out on wide branches, tiny green ones who live in and on grass, ones with long fingers who live in thin branches.
For a long time, it was assumed that similar lizards across islands would be related. So all the big brown branch anoles are related, and all the tiny grass anoles are related, and so on.
But once we got genetic testing, we discovered that the anoles are actually related to other anoles on their own island more closely than identical looking anoles on a neighboring island.
Enter the experiment. There are tiny Caribbean islands - more rocks in the sea - that are periodically colonized by anole lizards from other islands, before being wiped out when the whole rock is submerged in the next hurricane.
The author of the book went to these islands and released the same type of anoles. He then checked back on them a couple short years later. Lo and behold: the anoles had diverged into different forms per the prescribed formulas discovered on other islands. Speciation occurring before our very eyes.
Similar studies are done with, for example, highland pools that are colonized by tiny fish swimming upstream during heavy flooding - the fish adapt to the colors of their new environment in a generation or two. Then when the highland pool dries up, they die off. And later down the line a brand new group of fish swims upstream, colonizes the pools, and evolves the same color scheme in just a few generations.
https://www.amazon.com/Improbable-Destinies-Chance-Future-Evolution/dp/0399184929
With all that in mind, I think that even the biological aspect of this behavior should adapt within a handful of generations given strong enough pressure.
Well, they were once considered to be sub-species.
And yes, they can interbreed.
Bonobo-chimpanzee Hybrids - Mammalian Hybrids.
Hybridization between chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes ) and bonobos, also known as pygmy chimpanzees, (Pan paniscus ) has occurred in captivity ([Vervaecke and van Elsacker 1992]
The two species (or maybe sub species) would not encounter each other in the wild. In captivity, they are quite happy to breed, and they produce viable offspring.
Anecdotes from unrelated species about how evolution is sometimes very fast?
You need to understand the nature of the genetic differences and the standing genetic variation at the relevant loci in the specific population to know if this would be true.
While that particular citation may be correct, I wouldn’t recommend trusting that website (despite the fact that it is Google’s first result when searching for chimp-bonobo hybrids). The site also claims that pig-sheep hybrids exist:
Nope - these aren’t anecdotes, they’re scientifically repeatable tests (repeated on dozens of islands and pools) and even carried out in labs (check out the book, it’s FASCINATING - they talk about controlled experiments set up at universities using all sorts of animals as well as other living things).
These are scientific experiments in the field of evolution - repeatable, peer reviewed, challenged and examined by others in the field.
There are numerous cites below that in Google, all saying “Yes in captivity”.
You even said-
So exactly what are you arguing? You agree, yet you wanna argue?
And the cite does NOT say pig-sheep hybrids exist. They say there are claims of such, but they are doubtful. Caution: This disparate cross needs further confirmation, particularly from controlled breeding experiments.
No, not at all - I’m just pointing out that the linked site, which I also stumbled across, is not reliable. (The page about bonobos and chimps also has a picture of an alleged “chimp-gorilla” hybrid, a much more dubious claim).
I understand that they represent real science. But you cannot extrapolate to a conclusion that evolution can always happen this quickly.
That’s fair enough, but it DOES tell us that evolution doesn’t HAVE TO be slow (which I think is a fairly widespread notion).
They dont claim those are real either. They just discuss why there are such claims and the possibility. They don’t claim pig-sheep hybrids exist, as i said above.
They discuss the claims and possibilities of such, which is legit. They even discuss why bonobo/chimp hybrids do not seem to exist in the wild.