Evolutionary Twist

The ancestors of humans and chimpanzees may have interbred and exchanged significant numbers of genes after the initial split between the species, scientist report in the May17th online edition of Nature

Chimpanzees and humans officially split up along the evolutionary path up to ten million years ago, but it seems they may have continued having sex with one another for a good four million years after that.


A detailed analysis of human and chimp DNA suggests the lines finally diverged less than 5.4 million years ago.
The finding, published in the journal Nature, is about 1-2 million years later than the fossils have indicated.

Commenting on the research, Daniel Lieberman, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard, told the Associated Press: "It's a totally cool and extremely clever analysis.
"My problem is imagining what it would be like to have a bipedal hominid and a chimpanzee viewing each other as appropriate mates, not to put it too crudely."

From BBC

I'll let you make you own jokes for this one

Bad Blogger!

I have been a very bad blogger
I have not posted for ages and in fact have not posted half the things I wanted to.
It's largely due to being very hectic at the moment as I am moving shortly.
I've also had a few problems with my dear laptop Grace, my own fault as I have not been looking after her well enough.
The crazy thing is that I really have so much to blog about. This has already been a very full on year for me with loads happening.
I will have to do a quick catch up and bring things up to date.
Easier said than done!

So I promise to fill this space with lots of interesting stuff as soon as I'm able.