More information has come to light regarding the family history of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Before they went their separate evolutionary ways, the ancestors of chimpanzees and people got up to plenty of, well, monkey business.Moreover, this went on for about four million years.The most detailed analysis conducted of human and chimpanzee DNA reveals that after an initial separation from a common ancestor, between five and six million years ago, the species continued interbreeding.The implication is that speciation – the separation from a common ancestor – wasn’t the simple process scientists previously believed.Instead, it happened over millions of years during which “episodes” of hybridisation took place before the final separation into two distinct species, US researchers claim in a paper published online by Nature.“For the first time, we’re able to see the details written out in the DNA,” said biologist Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “What they tell us at the least is that the human-chimp speciation was very unusual.”
