eli5 if horses can breed with donkeys and goats can mate with sheep why can’t we make human / ape cross overs?
In: 5
Well first and foremost let’s get the elephant out of the room, the nature of a human/ape hybrid is an ethics and morality nightmare. So much so that it takes the most psychotic of individuals to seriously propose such unions. (Not calling OP psychotic, just the people who have tried to seriously study this in the past).
More scientifically though, humans and great apes are too far removed on the evolutionary ladder. For an ELI5 explanation, our genes do not “match” well enough to combine in a sperm/egg pairing. Any such attempt would most likely fail to even fertilize, and if by a miracle it did fertilize an egg, the embryo would quickly die as the cellular machinery would fail to replicate the genes.
Humans split from our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, about 4 to 6 millions years ago. This means we’ve had 4 to 6 million years of mostly diverging evolution and we’ve built up vastly different genetic structures.
Interestingly though, modern humans, i.e. homo-sapiens, did breed with other species, most notably Homo neanderthalensis, AKA Neanderthals. In fact most humans alive today have a fair bit of Neanderthal DNA. There were also other species that we bred with to lesser extents. However, modern humans were significantly faster to adapt, mostly due to our intelligence, and thusly we out competed these other human species and either drove them to extinction or forced them to merge into our populations, or both.
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