Ah...busy with other things, and Evolgen pounced on this story of hybrdization in the midst of the split between the pre-human and pre-chimpanzee lineages 5-7 million years ago. Carl Zimmer offers some social perspective, while John Hawks tears into the science (tears, cuts and bludgeons, actually). I don't know about the details of the science here, there is a lot of exciting hype. Talk of human-chimpanzee hybridization is trangressive and appeals to our folk mythologies of man-apes. I also know that only one chimpanzee fossil has been recovered, and the pre-Australopithecene history of own lineage is rather sktechy and spotty. The "Out of Africa" debate should make us cautious about inferring carelessly from the genetic data. Nevertheless, this paper does reemphasize our fascination with the topic of human-non-human chimeras. Last year I took issue with this passage in Jerry Coyne and H. Allen Orr's Speciation:
...Wilson et al. are probably ...
