Recent anthropological research has been finding evidence that Homo sapien mated with other Homo species. A prehistoric child's skull was discovered in Portugal's Lapedo Valley in 1999
with both Neandertal and H. sapien features, and an adolescent skeleton in Romania's Carpathian Mountains found in 2003 is also hypothesized to be a hybrid with a different, but another intriguing combination of both species.
There also is some evidence of intermingled communities with sharing of arts and tool-making.
But today's article in the The Boston Globe, "Humans,Chimps May Have Bred After Split" is going to really shake Christian conservatives.
"... researchers, working at the Cambridge-based Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, used a wealth of newly available genetic data to estimate the time when the first human ancestors split from the chimpanzees. The team arrived at an answer that is at least 1 million years later than paleontologists had believed, based on fossils of early, humanlike creatures.
The lead scientist said that this jarring conflict with the fossil record, combined with a number of other strange genetic patterns the team uncovered, led him to a startling explanation: that human ancestors evolved apart from the chimpanzees for hundreds of thousands of years, and then started breeding with them again before a final break"
Will this get us closer to solving both the Neandertal Schwarzenegger and G.W. Bush monkey riddles?
