Lair of the Beasts: Ape-Human Cross-Breeds

The idea that humans and gorillas (or humans and chimpanzees) could cross-breed sounds not just bizarre, but like something straight out of nightmarish science-fiction. Indeed, such a thing should not be possible in the slightest.

Yes, it is quite true that gorillas and humans are, at a genetic level, approximately 98 percent identical. It is, however, this two remaining percent that accounts for the many and varied differences between human beings and the great apes.

And it is this small percentage of differences that, in part, prevent cross-breeding from occurring between apes and humans. This has not, however, prevented rumors and tales from circulating to the effect that such breeding has occurred.

Born in Mexico in 1834, Julia Pastrana was a woman afflicted by what is termed congenital, generalized hypertrichosis, or as it is most often referred: Wolf Man Syndrome. In severe cases, this condition not only causes strange psychological behaviour and wild emotional mood swings, but the body and face of the victim becomes covered in thick hair

For the most part, however, people with the condition display, beneath that thick hair, the normal facial appearance and skull-structure as the rest of us. But, Julia Pastrana was noticeably and gruesomely different.

Most unfortunately, and like a lot of people with physical deformities in centuries past, Pastrana was forced to earn a meager living in so-called circus freak-shows, at which she was sensationally advertised as being half-human and half-ape.

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