In an entry to Edge.org’s annual New Years challenge question, “What will change everything?” Richard Dawkins wrote “Breaking the species barrier.” He listed four practical demonstrations that would fulfill this everything-changer:
1. The discovery of relict populations of extinct hominins such Homo erectus and Australopithecus.
2. A successful hybridization between a human and a chimpanzee.
3. An experimental chimera in an embryology lab, consisting of approximately equal numbers of human and chimpanzee cells.
4. [...] [An] intermediate genome between this reconstituted ‘ancestor’ and modern humans would, if implanted in an embryo, grow into something like a reborn Australopithecus: Lucy the Second.
Dawkins mentions at the end of the entry that he has not decided whether he is hopeful that any of these are demonstrated, but that it is exciting to think about nonetheless. And this got me to thinking: what exactly would you call a human-chimpanzee hybrid? Humanzee? Chuman? Manpanzee?
Furthermore, what would this thing look like? Well, thankfully I have an answer to this second question. According to this 100% scientifically accurate video I found on YouTube, it would look something like Sloth from The Goonies:
This reminds me of the extrapolation program in the horror book The Relic; you put DNA from two creatures in and it gives you the “intermediate” form. As Darwin himself said, though, picking to living creatures and trying to extrapolate back to something intermediate between both is not a sure recipe for success. Chimpanzees are definitely informative for considerations of human evolution, but given that their fossil record is essentially empty, we can’t be sure that they’re really as “unchanged” as we think. Hybridizing a human and chimpanzee would support our overall similarity, but it wouldn’t definitely reveal what our common ancestors was like.
… and yet a great number of paleoanthropologists consistently claim it does. It’s sad, really.