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?

  • arthur@lemmy.zip
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    7 days ago

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

    Other close relative species don’t exist anymore.

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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    7 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
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        7 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.world
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          7 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.

  • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.ee
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    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.

    • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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      7 days ago

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

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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        7 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
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          6 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
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            6 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.

    • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml
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      6 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