EBONY AND IVORY

The human species began as the hybrid offspring of a male pig and a female chimpanzee, a leading geneticist has suggested.
The startling claim has been made by Eugene McCarthy, of the University of Georgia, who is also one of the worlds leading authorities on hybridisation in animals.
He points out that while humans have many features in common with chimps, we also have a large number of distinguishing characteristics not found in any other primates.





The origin of the species? A remarkable new theory advanced by a leading geneticist suggests that human beings may have originally emerged as the hybrid offspring of a male pig and a female chimpanzee


Dr McCarthy says these divergent characteristics are most likely the result of a hybrid origin at some point far back in human evolutionary history.
What's more, he suggests, there is one animal that has all of the traits which distinguish humans from our primate cousins in the animal kingdom.
'What is this other animal that has all these traits?' he asks rhetorically. 'The answer is Sus scrofa, the ordinary pig.'
Dr McCarthy elaborates his astonishing hypothesis in an article on Macroevolution.net, a website he curates. He is at pains to point out that that it is merely a hypothesis, but he presents compelling evidence to support it.
 
More...

• From the forest giraffe to the flufftail: Shocking report reveals that 21,286 animal species are under threat of extinction
  

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2515969/Humans-evolved-female-chimpanzee-mated-pig-Extraordinary-claim-American-geneticist.html#ixzz2m8Kqy2kT
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I would take this report with a pinch of salt.

and quite possible a lovely apple sauce

Flap Gallagher wrote:I would take this report with a pinch of salt.

and quite possible a lovely apple sauce

Certain  Cannibals used to refer to their 'dinner'  as Long Pig !!

According to some accounts I've read over the years, human meat tastes like pork. I'm surprised by this claim as I've always been led to believe that cross species breeding wasn't possible.
 
Next time the wife moans at me I'll go OINK OINK 

stardesk wrote:According to some accounts I've read over the years, human meat tastes like pork. I'm surprised by this claim as I've always been led to believe that cross species breeding wasn't possible.
 
Next time the wife moans at me I'll go OINK OINK 

Cross-breeding isn't possible naturally, but scientists today are just experimenting on animal and plant hybrids by tinkering with DNA - who's to say a previous civilization didn't do the same?

Hello Tess.
 
Despite the early civilizations being inventive and clever it was mainly in the realms of constructions, such as the Egyptian, Greek and Roman buildings. There were other inventions but there is no evidence of them being far enough advanced to accomplish genetic/DNA engineering.
 
Mind you, our planet is millions of years old so who is to know what civilizations have come and gone? Although I'm sure we would have found evidence of them by now, especially considering our findings of fossils that are millions of years old. Surely something would have been found by now.

stardesk wrote:Hello Tess.
 
Despite the early civilizations being inventive and clever it was mainly in the realms of constructions, such as the Egyptian, Greek and Roman buildings. There were other inventions but there is no evidence of them being far enough advanced to accomplish genetic/DNA engineering.
 
Mind you, our planet is millions of years old so who is to know what civilizations have come and gone? Although I'm sure we would have found evidence of them by now, especially considering our findings of fossils that are millions of years old. Surely something would have been found by now.

Not necessarily. We seem to be discovering new things all the time recently that turned our previous beliefs on their head. Look at the Denisovian discovery. Plus, when you think of civilizations that are millions of years old, I expect all evidence would be buried miles deep - if they even came from this planet in the first place!  

ALLAKAKA wrote:The human species began as the hybrid offspring of a male pig and a female chimpanzee, a leading geneticist has suggested.
The startling claim has been made by Eugene McCarthy, of the University of Georgia, who is also one of the worlds leading authorities on hybridisation in animals.
He points out that while humans have many features in common with chimps, we also have a large number of distinguishing characteristics not found in any other primates.





The origin of the species? A remarkable new theory advanced by a leading geneticist suggests that human beings may have originally emerged as the hybrid offspring of a male pig and a female chimpanzee


Dr McCarthy says these divergent characteristics are most likely the result of a hybrid origin at some point far back in human evolutionary history.
What's more, he suggests, there is one animal that has all of the traits which distinguish humans from our primate cousins in the animal kingdom.
'What is this other animal that has all these traits?' he asks rhetorically. 'The answer is Sus scrofa, the ordinary pig.'
Dr McCarthy elaborates his astonishing hypothesis in an article on Macroevolution.net, a website he curates. He is at pains to point out that that it is merely a hypothesis, but he presents compelling evidence to support it.
 
More...

• From the forest giraffe to the flufftail: Shocking report reveals that 21,286 animal species are under threat of extinction
  

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2515969/Humans-evolved-female-chimpanzee-mated-pig-Extraordinary-claim-American-geneticist.html#ixzz2m8Kqy2kT
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

I suspect that pig's descendant was a politician  or possibly a banker. Definitely a member of the EUSSR.

Can anybody tell me how long a pig's orgasm lasts four?

Thirty...that's 30 or 2 x 15 minutes!


Reincarnation, I'm booking my bacon now sunshine.

Tess wrote:

It is inappropriate to post up real pictures of other posters without their permission , they'll be asking for their account to be deleted IMMEDIATELY.

wyatt1 wrote:Certain  Cannibals used to refer to their 'dinner'  as Long Pig !!

The aforementioned Cannibals also preferred the 'local'  Long Pigs  to the 'European' Long Pigs  as they regarded the European variety as tasting  too salty owing to their  habit of using too much salt in  their  food. This however did not deter them from cooking up the odd Missionary or two.     

No, Humans Are Not Chimp-Pig Hybrids

Back in July of this year, Eugene McCarthy proposed that humans are the result of hybridization between chimps and pigs. This didn't get much attention at the time, but today's Daily Mail discussed it, so there might be an upswing of attention.



Who is the claimant
Eugene McCarthy acquired his BS (in Mathematics), MS (in Genetics) and PhD (in Genetics) at the University of Georgia; the last of these degrees he acquired in 2003. According to his Google+, he is a geneticist, evolutionary theorist, author, and web entrepreneur, and his employment for the last 5 years has been his website, macroevolution.net.

To quote from macroevolution.net:
During my years at the genetics department, I became increasingly dissatisfied with the standard explanation of evolution. The more I read about fossils, the more convinced I became that Darwin's account of the evolutionary process was fundamentally flawed. Moreover, in my study of hybrids I became aware that an alternative way of thinking about evolution, what I now call "stabilization theory," could do a better job of explaining the available data.

So in his own words, Dr. McCarthy thinks evolutionary science is wrong somehow but thinks he knows better. Dr. McCarthy does have a book about bird hybrids published by Oxford University Press, which appears to be his most recent published scientific work; his attempts to publish a similar book about mammals and about his new theory of animal origins have not worked out, possibly because of his claims...

What is the claim
Various apes have mated, produced viable offspring, and continued mating with various species of pigs, and this mating has produced some of the modern and extinct species of apes. In particular, humans are the result of mating between, to quote from the above-linked article from phys.org, "a male boar or pig (Sus scrofa) with a female chimp (Pan troglodytes)".

Why this claim is probably, almost definitely, wrong
PZ Myers at Pharyngula discussed some of the reasons why this hypothesis can not be true, but I will just place the most obvious ones here:

1) The only evidence that Dr. McCarthy offers in support of this claim are morphological and behavioural "similarities" between pigs and humans. Morphology is useful for determining evolutionary relationships, but it can be misleading if where that morphology came from (the ontogeny of the morphology; what did the anatomy look like in embryos/fetuses/neonates/juveniles) is not investigated. That kangaroos and humans both walk on their hindlimbs only is a meaningless observation unless there is evidence that we both acquired that trait in the same way.

2) Dr. McCarthy makes this extreme evolutionary hypothesis without discussing the genome very much, which is odd, for a geneticist. But he gives no genomic evidence, whatsoever, that human evolution had porcine input. In fact he states, on the linked page, that there is no reason to suppose that the genes derived from pigs in modern humans would be sequentially similar to those of pigs, because a given type of gene is very rarely present in only a single type of organism. While the second part of his sentence is true, there should be genetic similarities between pig and human genomes if any of the human genome is derived from pig. He offers no such evidence, possibly because every published genomic study of pigs, human, and non-human apes suggests that the former are only distantly related to the latter two.

3) Pigs and apes are both placental mammals, but not very related to one another. So their last common ancestor may have been sometime in the late Cretaceous, 70ish million years ago. The claim that the gametes of a pig and a chimp would be compatible in any sort of way requires evidence that other such large crosses are possible. Dr. McCarthy has no such evidence, although he thinks he does, which results in such bizarre claims as claiming that platypuses and echidnas (the most primitive living mammals) are the results of crosses between birds and mammals, which last shared a common ancestor at least 300 million years ago. Such an idea has been refuted for over a century.

Does this claim deserve attention?
This claim was first posted online in July and it didn't get much press because it's ridiculous. So I'm really confused as to why the Daily Mail is giving it any press now, almost five months after it was first thrown online. Well, I'm not totally confused, but I'll get back to that.

No, it doesn't deserve attention. The author is a modern day Charles Fort in the sense that he is really good at tracking down small pieces of data in order to support a seemingly nonsensical conclusion. But in the scientific world, hypotheses deserve to be tested.

Four years ago a paper was published in PNAS that hypothesized that some members of insects are the result of a hybridization event between adult insects and velvet worms which produced caterpillars which eventually mutated and became other forms of insect larvae. That such a paper was published in the fourth most powerful journal in life/earth sciences was very confusing. Even a subsequent commentary letter published in PNAS asked WTF the journal was thinking. To quote from that letter,

This paper has fallen through the cracks of the review process of one of the most prestigious scientific journals, and this has not passed unnoticed. Online debates have erupted between those appalled that such article has appeared in a scientific forum and those who feel that scientific debate requires that all ideas, no matter how ill- formed, be discussed. But we should ask whether an individual can propose any theory, no matter how unsupported that idea may be, and demand that others do the work to test it scientifically.

Dr. McCarthy's hypothesis demands that others do the work to test it scientifically, while ignoring multiple lines of scientific evidence that it is wrong, and even making false claims about the hybridization abilities of mammals to the extreme of claiming that mammals and birds used to (or still can?) be able to produce viable offspring.

Why did the Daily Mail publish this?
The Daily Mail is known for its less-than-stellar record in discussing scientific research. Even if no malice was meant, promoting this research as if it is something that an actual scientist thinks (note that the Daily Mail refers to Dr. McCarthy as a leading geneticist, even though some of his most recent genetics work was published in 2004) results in the public thinking ill of scientists. When the Daily Mail introduces Dr. McCarthy as "Eugene McCarthy, of the University of Georgia", (which is a false statement; Dr. McCarthy, as far as I can tell, is not employed by the University of Georgia, and hasn't been for several years), that allows the audience to think ill of the University of Georgia in particular but academia in general.

While I don't think that the author of the piece intended to make light of evolution, evolutionary theory, or scientists in general, I am well aware of the hostility that the Daily Mail has for "controversial" scientific subjects.

Publicizing ridiculous independent, unpublished scientific hypotheses at the same level as academically-scrutinized published scientific papers confuses the lay audience into thinking that all scientific research is similarly incompetent. In the Information Age, wherein everyone has the same ability to throw something online, not discriminating between "this is something some loonie put online" and "this is a well-researched study reviewed by independent authorities" leads to all kinds of pseudoscientific nonsense, some of which just plain kills people.

http://observationdeck.io9.com/no-humans-are-not-chimp-pig-hybrids-1474029809

"Shut it Mr Verbosity".

Didge wrote:No, Humans Are Not Chimp-Pig Hybrids

Does this claim deserve attention?
This claim was first posted online in July and it didn't get much press because it's ridiculous. So I'm really confused as to why the Daily Mail is giving it any press now, almost five months after it was first thrown online. Well, I'm not totally confused, but I'll get back to that.

.......
Why did the Daily Mail publish this?
The Daily Mail is known for its less-than-stellar record in discussing scientific research. Even if no malice was meant, promoting this research as if it is something that an actual scientist thinks (note that the Daily Mail refers to Dr. McCarthy as a leading geneticist, even though some of his most recent genetics work was published in 2004) results in the public thinking ill of scientists. When the Daily Mail introduces Dr. McCarthy as "Eugene McCarthy, of the University of Georgia", (which is a false statement; Dr. McCarthy, as far as I can tell, is not employed by the University of Georgia, and hasn't been for several years), that allows the audience to think ill of the University of Georgia in particular but academia in general.

While I don't think that the author of the piece intended to make light of evolution, evolutionary theory, or scientists in general, I am well aware of the hostility that the Daily Mail has for "controversial" scientific subjects.

Publicizing ridiculous independent, unpublished scientific hypotheses at the same level as academically-scrutinized published scientific papers confuses the lay audience into thinking that all scientific research is similarly incompetent.

http://observationdeck.io9.com/no-humans-are-not-chimp-pig-hybrids-1474029809

Cutting Didge's long reply down to size, apart from discrediting the scientist, what this article is saying basically is that it's all Daily Mail rubbish, and that it shouldn't be brought to the attention of the "lay audience", i.e. the stupid masses. You didn't write this did you Didge? What the article fails to mention is that the piece was actually in the Telegraph (and Independent I think) as well as other worthy papers, yet he only cites the Daily Mail. Maybe I should e-mail him and suggest he join Speakfree; seems to be one of their type.

Tess wrote:Cutting Didge's long reply down to size, apart from discrediting the scientist, what this article is saying basically is that it's all Daily Mail rubbish, and that it shouldn't be brought to the attention of the "lay audience", i.e. the stupid masses.  You didn't write this did you Didge?  What the article fails to mention is that the piece was actually in the Telegraph (and Independent I think) as well as other worthy papers, yet he only cites the Daily Mail.  Maybe I should e-mail him and suggest he join Speakfree; seems to be one of their type.

Interesting you cut out the part where it refutes the claims:


Why this claim is probably, almost definitely, wrong
PZ Myers at Pharyngula discussed some of the reasons why this hypothesis can not be true, but I will just place the most obvious ones here:

1) The only evidence that Dr. McCarthy offers in support of this claim are morphological and behavioural "similarities" between pigs and humans. Morphology is useful for determining evolutionary relationships, but it can be misleading if where that morphology came from (the ontogeny of the morphology; what did the anatomy look like in embryos/fetuses/neonates/juveniles) is not investigated. That kangaroos and humans both walk on their hindlimbs only is a meaningless observation unless there is evidence that we both acquired that trait in the same way.

2) Dr. McCarthy makes this extreme evolutionary hypothesis without discussing the genome very much, which is odd, for a geneticist. But he gives no genomic evidence, whatsoever, that human evolution had porcine input. In fact he states, on the linked page, that there is no reason to suppose that the genes derived from pigs in modern humans would be sequentially similar to those of pigs, because a given type of gene is very rarely present in only a single type of organism. While the second part of his sentence is true, there should be genetic similarities between pig and human genomes if any of the human genome is derived from pig. He offers no such evidence, possibly because every published genomic study of pigs, human, and non-human apes suggests that the former are only distantly related to the latter two.

3) Pigs and apes are both placental mammals, but not very related to one another. So their last common ancestor may have been sometime in the late Cretaceous, 70ish million years ago. The claim that the gametes of a pig and a chimp would be compatible in any sort of way requires evidence that other such large crosses are possible. Dr. McCarthy has no such evidence, although he thinks he does, which results in such bizarre claims as claiming that platypuses and echidnas (the most primitive living mammals) are the results of crosses between birds and mammals, which last shared a common ancestor at least 300 million years ago. Such an idea has been refuted for over a century.


I would love to see the other articles to see if they made the comical errors like the Daily Mail.


Please present them.


So please counter the evidence also that you quietly igniored

Hold up chum, you left after a Gettysburg Address of a leaving speech; you've posted more since not being here than when you were.

Here is some more for you Tess:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/07/02/the-mfap-hypothesis-for-the-origins-of-homo-sapiens/

You need a bloody good dose of Ritalin.

Sister Mary wrote:You need a bloody good dose of Ritalin.

Boring, stick to the debate instead of your childish rants please Keith

In 2012, research published in Nature magazine showed that pig’s genome is in the same way adaptable and susceptible to domestication as humans. Pigs suffer from the same genetic and protein malfunctions that account for many human diseases sharing 112 DNA mutations including Alzheimer, Parkinson and obesity. However, this research made no claim about links between pigs and humans.

Here is where Eugene McCarthy’s hybrid theory comes. McCarthy is not just another theorist, he has spent most of his life studying hybrids and particular avian and mammalian hybrids, making him an expert on the topic. He suggests that pigs and chimpanzees are compatible to mate and that hybrids naturally occur in nature. He has found that traits distinguishing chimpanzees from humans consistently link pigs with humans alone.

http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/geneticist-suggests-humans-could-be-hybrids-00704

Tess wrote:
Didge you need to sort out your paranoia.  I left parts out because that wasn't the part I was disputing.  I was disputing that he put it down to merely Daily Mail hype, which it wasn't.  Also I took offence at his remark about it not being brought to the attention of 'lay people', as if it's nothing to do with us because we're all too stupid to understand it.  I'll dig out the other papers it was mentioned in.

As to the rest, I agree with you, I think this hypothesis is rubbish.  We all know it was aliens who created modern man.  

like the humour in your last part. As to the Daily Mail, maybe this person only saw that it was the Mail that printed this and that the other newspapers just copied the Mail. The fact is it was proposed a while back so you have to wonder why only now the Mail has printed this and made errors about the claimant