Indiscretion

[JesusA (imported)]

The following email arrived just a bit ago from a colleague in sexuality research. I thought it ought to be on this board….

Thanks for all the interesting replies to my inquiry about treatment of sex offenders. Now on to a lighter topic – bestiality.

You may recall last year there was a DNA study that concluded that our hominin ancestors interbred with their chimpanzee-like cousins for hundreds of thousands of years after the two lines split, about 5 million years ago, and that this interbreeding led to us inheriting some DNA from the chimpanzee line. Shocking enough. But now comes a DNA study from the University of Florida (reported in today's NYT at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/scien ... ref=slogin) which reports that the human pubic louse diverged from the gorilla louse a mere 3.3 million years ago -- that is, several million years after hominins diverged from the common ancestors of humans and gorillas.

Although the authors are circumspect about how this happened, let me boldly go where there are no data and say, a member of our ancestral species Australopithecus afarensis -- 'Lucy' or one of her relatives -- got it on with a gorilla. And we have been paying for her or his indiscretion ever since.