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<o:Author>KEVIN FREELS</o:Author>
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<DIV>Is anyone here a primatologist, anthropologist, or geneticist?</DIV>
<DIV>I am working on a research paper for no particular reason than to organize
my thoughts and I need to find out a few things.</DIV>
<DIV>1.) Bonobos show that they diverged from chimpanzees about 2 mya. Are
they capable of breeding with regular chimpanzees. Do they show any history of
doing so? If so, do they produce sterile offspring?</DIV>
<DIV>2.) A donkey and a horse may make a mule. Sterile, but a creature that has
characteristics of both horses and donkeys. A bengal cat is a cross between the
asian leopard cat (felis bengalensis) and a domestic house cat. The male
offspring are also sterile, but the females may breed yet again with a domestic
housecat male and produce males that are not sterile. Are there similar
occurrances in the primate world?</DIV>
<DIV>3.) Is there a single known primate that a human is capable of breeding
with, even if it were to produce something really weird looking and sterile?
What about crosses between Gibbons, baboons, orang-utans, gorrillas, etc?</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>My research didn;t originally go in this direction, but it seems to be
making a slight turn towards problems with the entire classification system. The
entire Homo fossil record is full of weird combinations of archaic and modern
type hominids. Combinations such as human-like teeth and small brains,
large craniums with supraorbital ridges, bipedal stature with small brains, etc.
</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I am starting to get the idea that the last 3 million years was a huge orgy
of crossbreeding and that the fossil record, given the chance process of
fossilization, will probably never be able to tell the whole story. Maybe a
group of modern humans about 200k years ago simply decided to stop
crossbreeding. H. sapiens may have assimilated H.neanderthanelsis as they moved
into Europe and Asia, but weren't able to produce viable offspring either
because neanderthal women weren't capable of giving birth to the human babies
(probably due to a longer gestation period) and/or the production of sterile
offspring. </DIV>
<DIV>Bipedalism may have fluctuated back and forth, (3 steps forward, two steps
back) in several lines until the right conditions came along that simply
required it. </DIV>
<DIV>The Oldowan tools show up about 2.4 mya. This is towards the end of the A.
africanus period. Might older tools and younger fossils of A africanus be found?
Are someof the fossils discovered simply crossbreeds of different species?</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Comments?</DIV>
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