99 sats \ 2 replies \ @oliverweiss 1 Mar \ on: Fun Fact Friday - Best Fun Fact Gets 10,000 Sats meta
(The following can be offensive to someone)
The average pig now has only 16% body fat – lower than the average for people in the UK, and I guess in many other countries.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/22/fat-pig-livestock-lean-body-britons?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwAR3pN8pu8FvqugB_UCpINiySKAers3p5i4_uww8BgIlXSvj0vttw3CPUr78
For humans, 16% means excellent conditions
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/body-fat-percentage-chart
Speaking of pigs & humans, there's an intriguing hypothesis that humans originated from a hybridisation between pigs and chimpanzees.
Generally speaking, interspecies hybrids—like mules, ligers (lion-tiger hybrids), or zedonks (zebra-donkey hybrids)—are less fertile than the parents that produced them. However, as McCarthy has documented in his years of research into hybrids, many crosses produce hybrids that can produce offspring themselves. The mule, he notes, is an exceptionally sterile hybrid and not representative of hybrids as a whole. When it comes time to play the old nuclear musical chairs and produce gametes, some types of hybrids do a much better job. Liger females, for example, can produce offspring in backcrosses with both lions and tigers. McCarthy also points out that fertility can be increased through successive backcrossing with one of the parents, a common technique used by breeders. In the case of chimp - pig hybridization, the "direction of the cross" would likely have been a male boar or pig (Sus scrofa) with a female chimp (Pan troglodytes), and the offspring would have been nurtured by a chimp mother among chimpanzees (shades of Tarzan!). The physical evidence for this is convincing, as you can discover for yourself with a trip over to macroevolution.net.
Full explanation of the theory (with lots of interesting detail, even if you remain sceptical), is here :
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Wow, never heard of this!
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