A HUMAN-chimpanzee hybrid was born in a Florida lab 100 years ago before being killed by panicked doctors, according to a scientist.
Renowned evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup coined the term “humanzee” which refers to a human-chimp crossbreed - a scientifically possible hybridisation which was attempted throughout the 20th century.
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A scientist has claimed that a human-chimp hybrid was born and then killed in a Florida lab in the 1920s. Pictured Oliver the chimp.Credit: Wikipedia
Gallup, who developed the famous mirror "self-recognition" test which proved primates could acknowledge their own reflection, claims his former university professor told him that a humanzee baby was born at a research facility where he used to work.
Speaking to The Sun Online in 2018, he said: “One of the most interesting cases involved an attempt which was made back in the 1920s in what was the first primate research centre established in the US in Orange Park, Florida.
“They inseminated a female chimpanzee with human semen from an undisclosed donor and claimed not only that pregnancy occurred but the pregnancy went full term and resulted in a live birth.
“But in the matter of days, or a few weeks, they began to consider the moral and ethical considerations and the infant was euthanised.”
Details of the top secret experiments come as apart-human, part monkey embryowas created by scientists in California with the hopes of using them to grow stem cells.
And late last year, German and Japanese scientists alsospliced human cells into monkey brainsin an expert similar to hit movie series the Planet of the Apes.
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Despite claims in the 1970s that Oliver was a human-chimp hybrid, it was proven that the animal was not a humanzee in the 1990sCredit: Corbis - Getty
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A human-chimp hybrid, or 'humanzee', is scientifically possible. File picture showing 1968 film Planet Of The ApesCredit: Rex Features
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Soviet scientist Ilya Ivanov failed in his controversial attempts to create a humanzeeCredit: Wikipedia
Gallup said the professor worked at Yerkes before the research centre moved to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia in 1930.
He added: “He told me the rumour was true. And he was a credible scientist in his own right.”
The most infamous humanzee project was conducted by Russia biologist Ilya Ivanov - also in the 1920s - who tried and failed to create a Soviet super-soldier using human sperm and female chimps.
Another reported case happened in Maoist China in 1967 where a female primate became pregnant with a human-hybrid only to die from neglect after the lab's scientists were forced to abandon the project following the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution.
Gallup’s term humanzee became well known in the 1970s after the emergence of a creature known as Oliver – a bald chimp who walked on his hind legs.
Oliver was presented by some as the "missing link" between humans and chimps.
But tests conducted on Oliver in 1996 proved once and for all that the animal had 48 chromosomes and was therefore not a human-hybrid.
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Gallup says humans are also able to breed with gorillas and orangutansCredit: University at Albany
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Oliver caused a sensation among the scientific communityCredit: Getty - Contributor
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Dr Frans De Wall studies the social behavior of chimpanzees from his tower overlooking the compound at Yerkes Primate Research Center at Emory University in AtlantaCredit: Alamy
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Lana, a two and half year old chimpanzee, uses a typewriter-like device to punch out sentences using symbols for words in an experiment in the 1970sCredit: Corbis - Getty
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Apes are seen going about their business at the Yerkes Primate Research CentreCredit: Emory University
Gallup said: “It was proven that Oliver was not a humanzee despite the fact that he looked very similar in terms of assuming an upright posture and having a protruding nose and all kinds of other things.”
And Gallup, who teaches biopsychology at the University at Albany in New York, insists that humans can be crossbred with all the great apes – not just chimpanzees.
He said: “All of the available evidence both fossil, paleontological and biochemical, including DNA itself, suggests that humans can also breed with gorillas and orangutans.
“Humans and all three of the great apes species are all descended from a single common ape-like ancestry.
