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?

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    64
    ·
    edit-2
    4 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.

        • buran@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          13
          ·
          3 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.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        25
        ·
        edit-2
        4 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.

    • intensely_human@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      15
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      4 days ago

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

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        10
        ·
        edit-2
        4 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
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          3 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
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            edit-2
            3 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
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      3 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

    • Ganesh Venugopal@lemmy.mlOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      82
      ·
      edit-2
      4 days ago

      Why else would I ask that question? Completely unrelated but you won’t happen to have any goats nearby, would you?

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    4 days ago

    You’re short a comma. It’s the American Ghost Comma right after ‘humans’.

    Remember that Rogers Telecom paid out a million bucks because it couldn’t write a clear sentence.

    • topherclay@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      22
      ·
      4 days ago

      Him: “Which animals can I fuck?”

      You: “This reminds me of canadian contract law. Also I can use this as an opportunity for language prescriptivism.”

      • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        4 days ago

        Actually the question was, “which animalbcan I breed with?”. I think it’s important not to misrepresent the facts.

        As for rogers, they didn’t have to pay Alliant because the court changed its mind after reading the french version of the contract. In the french version, it is clear the english contract means the plainly obvious interpretation, not the lawyery silent american comma bullshit!

        The deal was a five year term, that auto renews for five years unless you cancel it a year in advance.

        Alliant wanted to cancel the contract inside the first five year term, the gall of these lawyers!

        https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180723-the-commas-that-cost-companies-millions

  • keepcarrot [she/her]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    4 days ago

    I assume closely related hominids which are now extinct. Neanderthal DNA is present in current human strains, which means they didn’t even speciate (though potentially successful gestation was rarer).

    Why am I writing like an alien nerd observing humans?

  • intensely_human@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    4 days ago

    No.

    The biological definition of a species is “a group of organisms that can interbreed and produce fertile offspring” (in other words, the offspring need to also be able to reproduce; there are instances, such as mules, where two species reproduce but the offspring cannot themselves reproduce)

    • john89@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      4 days ago

      I don’t think that definition matters, considering the fertility of offspring is irrelevant to OP’s question.