Dangerous science

"Did humans and chimps once interbreed?", asks the New Scientist.

IT GOES to the heart of who we are and where we came from. Our human ancestors were still interbreeding with their chimp cousins long after first splitting from the chimpanzee lineage, a genetic study suggests. Early humans and chimps may even have hybridised completely before diverging a second time. If so, some of the earliest fossils of proto-humans might represent an abortive first attempt to diverge from chimps, rather than being our direct ancestors . . .

Does anyone appreciate what political dynamite these researchers may be playing with here? What would happen if it were found that some ethnic groups had more chimpanzee DNA than others? (N.B.: I'm not familiar with the details of this work, or of human evolutionary theory more generally, and this possibility may already have been ruled out. For example, ethnic differences may have arisen only at a later stage in human evolution.)

I don't much like chimpanzees, I'd rather have had gorillas or bonobos for family members.

Postscript:Judging from the interesting Wikipedia article on race, there seems to be no rational basis for any political problem of the kind just suggested. The genetic difference between human beings and chimpanzees is about 20 times that between one randomly chosen human being and another. More importantly, only something on the order of 10% of the genetic variation among human beings is "racial" (that is, associated with ancestry from a different continental-sized area of the globe). Added to which, it does indeed seem highly unlikely that interbreeding with chimpanzees occurred recently enough to affect some present-day human populations more than others.