>>Suibhne: Different mammals do not mate or interbreed.

That's going to come as a bit of a shock to any mules reading this thread - many will probably need to go into therapy as a result of this insensitive post that throws their ancestry into question.

From the Harvard Medical School:

"DNA studies indicate that Humans and chimpanzees carried on interbreeding for thousands, perhaps millions of years after the two species diverged.

The researchers say human evolution seems to have been much more complex than previously thought. This exchanging of genes probably helped both species survive more successfully in their environments.

Team member, Prof. D Reich says that this is just a hypothesis as it has not yet been proved. However, he said it would explain multiple features of their data. Their hypothesis is that there was an exchange of genes between our human ancestors and chimpanzees after the two species diverged.

This study was carried out at the Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. You can read about the study in the journal Nature."


Some evidence in Mudcat that it's still happening