Humans have one pair fewer chromosomes than other apes, as humans have 23 chromosome pairs, and chimpanzees have 24, with ape chromosomes 2 and 4 fused in the human genome into a large chromosome (which contains remnants of the centromere and telomeres of the ancestral 2 and 4). Īll great apes have similar genetic structure. On the other hand, rabbits and hares look very similar, but are only distantly related and cannot hybridize. For example, pugs and huskies look quite dissimilar, but belong to the same species and subspecies and can hybridize freely.

However, genetic similarity, and thus the chances of successful hybridization, is not always correlated with visual appearances. Hybridization between chimpanzees and bonobos has been documented, as they share 99.6% of their genomes. Ĭhimpanzees and humans are closely related, sharing 95% of their DNA sequence and 99% of coding DNA sequences. The possibility of hybrids between humans and other apes has been entertained since at least the medieval period Saint Peter Damian (11th century) claimed to have been told of the offspring of a human woman who had mated with an ape, and so did Antonio Zucchelli, an Italian Franciscan capuchin friar who was a missionary in Africa from 1698 to 1702, and Sir Edward Coke in 'The Institutes of the Lawes of England'.

The portmanteau humanzee for a human–chimpanzee hybrid appears to have entered usage in the 1980s. Serious attempts to create such a hybrid were made by Soviet biologist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov in the 1920s, and possibly by researchers in China in the 1960s, though neither succeeded. The humanzee (sometimes chuman, manpanzee or chumanzee) is a hypothetical hybrid of chimpanzee and human, thus a form of human–animal hybrid.

Aha am i not human graphic