Sex with Other Human Species Might Have Been Secret of Homo Sapiens’s Success
Advances help fill in the gaps associated with how Homo sapiens came to be....
"Recent advances in DNA-sequencing technology have enabled researchers to dramatically scale up data collection from living people as well as from extinct species. Analyses of these data with increasingly sophisticated computational tools indicate that the story of our family history is not as simple as most experts thought."
This is an interesting article that challenges not only current theories of the origin of human beings but also the long-standing assumption of lower hybrid fitness which continues to be integral to the general concept of species and speciation (as seen on our major field test (-;). Nevertheless, numerous scientists such as the ones involved in the above study have suggested that hybrid genotypes might demonstrate higher relative fitness under various environmental conditions.
ReplyDeleteThe following is a link to an article supporting the above hypothesis which discusses studies testing the fitness of hybrid genotypes across generations and habitats to examine their role in adaptation and speciation. In particular, these studies looked at some viruses, prokaryotes, plants and, the classic evolutionary model, Darwin’s Finches.
http://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/abstract/S0169-5347(10)00130-8?switch=standard
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