Chimp Genetics

In a letter to Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, his closest friend in 1857, Charles Darwin confided, “I cannot swallow Man [being that] distinct from a Chimpanzee.” Chimp genetics, by extension of Darwin’s theory, were expected to be similar to humans. Charles Darwin writes in his Autobiography –

“My Descent of Man was published in Feb. 1871. As soon as I had become, in the year 1837 or 1838, convinced that species were mutable products, I could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law.”

The chimp, since the nineteenth century, has been the poster-child missing link to humans. In twenty-first-century terms, the mammalian Y chromosomes were expected to be similar, as speculated by Darwin. However, new evidence demonstrates Darwin’s speculation to be wrong—the chimp Y chromosome differs radically from humans.

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Darwin, DNA, and the Neanderthals

 

Human and Neanderthal In 1856, just three years before the publication of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, the first Neanderthal in the fossil record was discovered in the Neander Valley limestone quarry located in Germany.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin argued against the concept that the Neanderthals were humans’ ancestors based on the Neanderthal skull’s larger size. “Nevertheless,” Darwin noted,

“it must be admitted that some skulls of very high antiquity, such as the famous one of Neanderthal, are well developed and capacious.”

The skull was larger than expected to be a human ancestor. Intuitively, Darwin was right.

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