Humanzee
| Humanzee | |
|---|---|
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Mammalia |
| Order: | Primates |
| Suborder: | Haplorhini |
| Superfamily: | Hominoidea |
| Family: | Hominidae |
| Subfamily: | Homininae |
| Tribe: | Hominini |
| Subtribe: | |
| Genus: | |
| Species: | Homo sapiens × Pan troglodytes or Pan paniscus |
| Binomial name | |
|
None |
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The humanzee (Homo sapiens sapiens × Pan) (also known as the Chuman or Manpanzee) is a hypothetical chimpanzee/human hybrid. An unsuccessful attempt to breed such a hybrid was made by Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov in the 1920s. There have been occasional reports of human-chimpanzee hybridization, notably regarding a performing chimp named Oliver during the 1970s, but none of them have been confirmed. There has been what people think to be a sighting of a humanzee in July of 2012 in Colorado. Similarly, the possibility of a chimpanzee–gorilla hybrid, known as koolakamba, also remains unsubstantiated.
The portmanteau word humanzee for a human–chimpanzee hybrid appears to have entered usage in the 1980s.
The possibility of human–ape hybrids has been entertained since at least the medieval period; Peter Damian (11th century) claimed to have been shown the monstrous offspring of a human woman who had mated with an ape.Linnaeus (1758) used Homo troglodytes as the taxonomical name for a hypothetical human and orangutan hybrid.
Chimpanzees and humans are closely related (sharing 95% of their DNA sequence and 99% of coding DNA sequences), leading to contested speculation that a hybrid is possible.
Humans have one pair fewer chromosomes than other apes, with ape chromosomes 2 and 4 fusing into a large chromosome (which contains remnants of the centromere and telomeres of the ancestral 2 and 4). Having different numbers of chromosomes is not an absolute barrier to hybridization; similar mismatches are relatively common in existing species, a phenomenon known as chromosomal polymorphism.
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Wikipedia