Ok, I am not supporting bestiality here. But, I just came to know about a Dogxim, a dog fox hybrid and I had known for a long time that horses and donkeys can breed (to produce a mule). So, I was just curious, can humans breed with any other animals closely related to us?

    • Ganesh Venugopal@lemmy.mlOP
      78·
      10 days ago

      Why else would I ask that question? Completely unrelated but you won’t happen to have any goats nearby, would you?

  • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
    130·
    10 days ago

    Homo sapiens are the last remaining species of hominina. Our closest remaining relatives, the Pan (chimpanzees and bonobos) diverged at least 6.5 million years ago. Though there is some evidence early hominina may have interbred with pan after the divergence as recently as 4 mya.

    This is more recent than dogs and foxes by a long way, and about the same as donkeys and horses. That, plus chromosomal analysis and some other research suggests it could be possible for a human and chimp or bonobo to interbreed, though likely not create fertile offspring. However, there has never been a confirmed case of this occurring, despite multiple claims.

    Edit: useful articles:

      • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
        26·
        10 days ago

        We’re talking way earlier than cavemen. The last interbreeding between our ancestors and chimps’ ancestors happened (using the most recent estimate I could find) a million years before the least recent evidence of the use of any stone tools. This is not a human that would be recognisable at all as a human.

    • arthur@lemmy.zipEnglish
      4·
      9 days ago

      Pretty sure that we can’t breed with chimps and generate a fertile offspring due the mismatch on the number of chromosomes.

    • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
      53·
      9 days ago

      So after reading the wiki, I believe the most likely successful attempt will be to mate a human with downe syndrome, with a chimpanzee. Let’s get on this. I wanna see some atrocities of nature.

        • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
          44·
          9 days ago

          The wiki says it’s hard with chimps because we have one less chromosome than chimps. Down syndrome: “all my homes got extra chromies”. They have an extra chromosome. Ergo: down syndrome + chimp = hybrid chimpmanzee.

            • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
              27·
              9 days ago

              Thats how down syndrome works. Look it up yourself, smart guy. People with down syndrome have 47 chromosomes instead of 46. Chimps have 48, so down syndrome people are one closer, by mutation. That means just one more mutation and we’re all set.

              Now start work on making a monkeyboy.

              • Zagorath@aussie.zone
                4·
                9 days ago

                Are you really this fucking thick? There’s more to genetic compatibility than chromosome count. Otherwise we’d be seeing human–Reeves’s muntjac hybrids. Or chimp-gorilla.

              • Mambert@beehaw.org
                2·
                7 days ago

                An odd pair of chromosomes makes it harder than being off by a pair. Mules are unbreedable due to their odd number of chromosomes.

                We have successfully bred with species further apart, including an alpaca and a llama.

                So yes all the science points to it being possible with humans, but ethically we can’t possibly do that.

                And it is not one more mutation to add an extra chromosome. It’s a loooot more.

  • arthur@lemmy.zipEnglish
    85·
    9 days ago

    Not anymore. We assimilated the neanderthals a long time ago.

    Other close relative species don’t exist anymore.

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
    63·
    9 days ago

    No, not since Neanderthals, Denisovians and friends went extinct.

    Even Neanderthals are a bit of a partial case, since the hybrid males were mostly sterile. We know this from the pattern that Neanderthal genes appear in modern DNA.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
        25·
        9 days ago

        Uhh, I think there was a Nature article about it. Per the Wikipedia, basically there’s just stretches of the X chromosome that are deserts of Neanderthal DNA, because when a Neanderthal allele is present and there isn’t a second copy, it’s a reproductive dead end and selected out.

        Oh, here.

        • buran@lemmy.worldEnglish
          12·
          9 days ago

          Most people of non-African origin (a fact that helped pinpoint where the mixing happened and when) have 1-3% or so, the amount varying by person and region.

  • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    664·
    9 days ago

    I just found this, so you’ll have to read it too: https://www.the-sun.com/news/3657105/prostitute-orangutan-pony-tragic-story/

    Summary:

    TW: sexual animal abuse

    Female orangutan named Pony was used as a prostitute for years. She was chained to a bed, shaved every other day leaving her with irritated, itchy, sore-covered skin. They also put make-up, perfume and jewellery on her, and taught her to perform sex acts. The local community didn’t want to let her go because she was generating great revenue. In the end it took 35 armed police officers to rescue her.

  • HorikBrun@kbin.earth
    53·
    10 days ago

    Breed with? No, not since we out-bred and out-competed Neandertals. And Denisovans. And at least one other ancestral human subspecies in sub-Saharan Africa. So at least 3 ancient homo sapiens subspecies that we used to interbreed with, but none left now.

  • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.eeEnglish
    46·
    9 days ago

    Conventional prehistory says there used to be animals we could interbreed with, but that we in fact bred with them so much that the hybrids replaced the creatures made to get said hybrid.

    These replaced peoples were, of course, designated members of the homo genus, which Homo Sapiens (the scientific name for humans) gets its name from, and they include things such as (using their common names, not their scientific names) Neanderthals (geographically found in Southern Europe), Denisovans (found mostly to the West, towards Asia), and Hobbits (yes, hobbits, they were found in the Pacific). Nothing of note happened in America.

    The Neanderthals and the Denisovans are of particular note, as their territories overlapped commonly, and there are cave findings that show they themselves interbred with each other and produced perfectly functioning offspring. I can only hope when they were engaging in the act, they asked to mingle and ended it with “no homo”.

    There are, however, reports that, at the same time in prehistory, we did try to breed with other animals that haven’t been replaced, typically the great apes, as evidenced by lice samples found in both us and them, but that this, quite expectedly, didn’t lead to any hybrid outcomes.

  • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
    40·
    10 days ago

    There used to be Neanderthals (homo sapiens neanderthalensis) and a few others, we basically interbred them out of existence.

    • Florn [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      13·
      10 days ago

      “Interbred them out of existence” is sort of a bleak way of looking at it. For a lot of people, they’re our ancestors. They’re a part of human history and heritage.

      • devfuuu@lemmy.world
        11·
        9 days ago

        It’s not really called “extinction” from more modern understanding I guess, more like assimilated over a long period of time and from species contact and living with each other.

    • tamal3@lemmy.world
      2·
      9 days ago

      Now that I’m middle aged… How old is Steve Jaleel in this clip? I’ve seen so much of his face that I can’t tell if he’s 15 or 25.

      Note: how have I never known his name is Jaleel White?

      Note 2: Family Matters aired from when he was 13 to 22 years old. So… That’s my answer.

    • intensely_human@lemm.ee
      151·
      9 days ago

      Neanderthals didn’t leave us; they merged with us. Neanderthal DNA is well represented in our current population.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
        10·
        9 days ago

        Yeah, but not their whole genome, and never at more then a few percent of the total modern human genome. It’s more like a remnant.

        • intensely_human@lemm.ee
          1·
          9 days ago

          How could it be less than their whole genome? Is more neanderthal dna lost than homo sapiens dna when the two mate somehow?

          • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
            2·
            8 days ago

            You, if you have non-African roots, have 1-4% Neanderthal DNA. Roughly, we can say that means you can take a slice of unrelated ancestors way back that’s 1-4% Neanderthals. Each of their kids had 50% of the Neanderthal genome, and, assuming the next incoming ancestor was fully Homo Sapiens, had grandkids with only 25% of the neanderthal genome.

            Since there’s a lot of people and a lot of interbreeding events, you’d naively expect it to be a completely different 50% every time, and collectively contain most or all of the whole thing. However, not every Neanderthal allele is equally likely to be passed down, so that’s not actually what happens.

            I don’t know how much of it actually remains across the human population exactly, but I do know parts of the X chromosome are complete deserts of Neanderthal DNA, at the very least. Like I went into elsewhere in the thread, that’s a pattern that indicates having Neanderthal admixture there causes sterility, and so male offspring with only one copy of the chromosome don’t reproduce, and don’t appear as an ancestor of yours. Those segments of the Neanderthal X chromosome are gone in living populations.

            Edit: Reading what you wrote again, I think the detail you might be missing is just that lots of people die with no descendants, and the carrying capacity of ice-age Europe was finite. It’s not like the two lines just fused together without a change in size; the mostly-human population slowly grew and the mostly-Neanderthal population slowly shrunk over a few millennia.

            It’s not known why, or how exactly that went down. It could be a reproductive quirk, or just humans being slightly better somehow. It’s probably wasn’t organised genocide, though, for quite a number of reasons.

    • Ganesh Venugopal@lemmy.mlOP
      141·
      10 days ago

      That’s absolutely preposterous, I am still alive and my friends say I am one of them Neanderthals

    • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      8 days ago

      “Why do they keep yelling ungabunga with a persistant erection every time we hang out? Fuck this I’m out.”

      space ship flies away