Early humans, chimps were kissing cousins, gene study suggests

[Dee]

Early human ancestors interbred with chimpanzees after the two species split, researchers propose.

The break from our chimpanzee cousins was messier, more recent, and occurred over a longer timescale than thought, according to a new genetic analysis.

"The genome analysis revealed big surprises, with major implications for human evolution," said study co-author Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Scientists had thought humans and chimps shared a common ancestor, but split about 6.5 million to 7.4 million years ago.

Previous research on the split of the species focused on average genetic differences.

Lander and his colleagues took advantage of the full genetic codes of humans and chimpanzees to estimate the age of sequences, rather than relying on an average.

'Evolutionary smoking gun'

If early humans and chimps separated, interbred and then parted ways again, it would explain the young nature of the human X chromosome....

http://www.cbc.ca/story/science/national/2006/05/17/human-chimp.html

It might also explain certain behaviours among humanoids. :p

[snakegrl]

LOL on that last bit.

[Green Monkey]

You know, it sickens us Monkeys to think that we're related to you humans. We all know damn well that the Monkey God made us, and you guys were just an unintended side-product of Creation. But noooo, these evil-loot-shun guys try and pin your messed up human deal on us monkeys. We ain't buying.

As to Monkeys doing it with Humans... Ewwwwww.

GM out :p

[Dee]

Monkeys combine warning calls

Wild monkeys can string two calls together to warn others, similar to the way humans form sentences, say scientists who studied primates in west Africa.

Male putty-nosed monkeys in Nigeria's Gashaka Gumti National Park use two main calls.

One, a string of "hacks," points to the presence of a hovering eagle. The other, calls of "pyow," warn about leopards.

Psychologists Klaus Zuberbuhler and Kate Arnold of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland found the monkeys can also combine pyows with hacks in a sequence to form sentence-like calls.

The monkeys usually emit one to three pyoys followed by up to four hacks, commanding the group to move on to safer terrain, the team reports in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

The discovery was made by playing recordings of natural and manipulated calls to 17 different monkey groups, and observing how they moved in response.

"Combining existing calls into meaningful sequences increases the variety of messages that can be generated," the pair concluded.

"The simple system used by putty-nosed monkeys encodes the presence of different types of danger and triggers group movement with just two basic call types."

Last week, scientists at the same university were part of a research team that reported bottlenosed dophins appear to use names to call each other.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/science/national/2006/05/17/monkey-calls.html