Before we all have to pay to use this thing I figured I could ask my last stupid question. See I’ve been thinking about this for awhile now and I even looked it up a couple of times but nothing seems to answer my question accuratly. Anyway, I know that some species like dogs and wolves can procreate and other animals that have decended from the same spieces, but what about primates and humans? Can say an ape and a human create anything? Can humans reproduce with any other speices? I know its wierd but it was just something that some friends of mine were talking about. Thanks!
Well Dogs are direct descendants of wolves that were domesticized about 30,000 (?) years ago which is not very long in evolutionary terms. The last common ancestor of humans and apes is on a time scale of millions of years and it’s highly unlikely that they could produce a hybrid. Monkeys, which share an even more distant common ancestor with humans than apes, IIRC have sperm that would be unable to penetrate a human egg.
If you do a search you’ll see that this question has come up several times, most recently here:
The consensus answer seems to be that a human/chimp hybrid might be possible, but would most likely be sterile. The farther out you go from this cross ( in terms of evolutionary relationship/genetic distance ), the less likely it would become. A little more detail can be found in the thread linked above.
- Tamerlane
True ( roughly, I think when exactly the dog was domesticated remains a matter of debate ), but coyotes and wolves split in the nieghborhood of one million years ago and they can still produce fertile offspring. Again, it’s unlikely humans and apes could, but a mule might be possible. Maybe :).
- Tamerlane