Who Knew a 1970 Burt Reynolds Film Would Explain Ancient Humanoid Admixture?

In 1970 this Blogger was dating an affectionate girl who had a fierce crush on a rising actor name Burt Reynolds.

She implored this Blogger to take her to see the Reynolds’ film SKULLDUGGERY because she had heard on the feminine grapevine that Reynolds wore the tightest pants in the history of males in the film.

SKULLDUGGERY is a sci fiction film, about scientists discovering a new type of humanoid in the jungle of Papua, the TROPIS.

It starred Reynolds, Susan Clark (COOGAN’S BLUFF) and Edward Fox (DAY OF THE JACKAL).

Legendary Karl Malden wanted to be in it, but he did not get the role, it went to an actor named Roger C. Carmel.

“In the film, Burt plays Douglas Temple, a con-man and airplane mechanic, who tricks his way onto an expedition into the jungles.

The expedition is headed by Dr. Sybil Greame (Airport 75’s Susan Clark) and Father ‘Pop’ Dillingham (veteran Australian actor Chips Rafferty) are in search of the missing link.

Douglas and his partner Otto (Roger C Carmel aka Star Trek’s Harry Mudd) figure that being on the expedition they can discover a phosphorus deposit to make themselves rich. Well that is until Douglas falls for the Sybil.

…. the Tropis are enslaved to mine phosphorus. But the film never shows their enslavement or that anyone thought it was wrong. Just business as usual.

It is really no wonder that one of the original titles for the novel was “The Murder of the Missing Link”. But what is most sadistic is there is no conscience in this story.

The abuse of these innocent creatures and you would think scientists would know better. One the scientists exclaims, “well if these creatures can breed with humans, then they are human?”

 Then you won’t believe what happens next, never have I seen such a stupid turn of events.

The third act of the film goes into what is the measure of man. I think it was trying to be like the infamous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial where human evolution was put on trial. It just keeps getting sillier….SOOTHSAYER.”

The climax of the film was the discovery that the Carmel character had slept with a sexy TROPI, and there was a hybrid in the oven.

This Blogger’s date was upset by the ending of the film; she thought it both sacrilegious and unscientific. Even her pleasant memory of Mr. Reynolds tight jeans did not assuage her discomfort.

She sought reassurance from this Blogger: “Gerry do you think it is possible for a human to have sex with an ape and have a baby?”

This Blogger still dazzled by the image of Pat Suzuki, (pre-KARATE KID), in an ape suit, assured her that was not possible.

Little did this Blogger know that human ancestors were prolific in their sex lives with other hominoids.

“From fragments of DNA in a 90,000-year-old finger bone, scientists have identified a fascinating new character in the story of our evolution: the first-known offspring of parents from two different branches of the human family tree.

The bone belonged to a 13-year-old girl whose mother was a Neanderthal — one of the ancient people who inhabited Europe and Asia between 450,000 and 40,000 years ago. But the girl’s father was a Denisovan — a mysterious offshoot of the genus Homo known only from a few bits of bone and the faint signatures that still linger in the genomes of modern humans.

The report …..adds to a growing body of evidence that ancient hominids — including some of our own direct ancestors — interacted and interbred repeatedly over the course of evolutionary history.

….people of European and Asian ancestry have roughly 2 percent Neanderthal DNA, and some East Asians and Pacific Islanders can trace as much as 6 percent of their genetic material to the Denisovans. The intermingling was pervasive enough that some scientists question whether our extinct cousins should be considered a subpopulation of Homo sapiens, rather than a distinct species, as they are typically defined today.

But in those studies, any prehistoric hanky-panky seemed like an abstraction — something done by unknown people untold millennia ago.

“The cool thing about this is, this is extremely direct evidence,” said Svante Pääbo, a molecular geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany who led the new research. “We’ve almost caught them in the act, so to speak.” Krause, Pääbo and their colleagues named the new hominid after Denisova Cave, where the 40,000-year-old remains were found. Subsequent studies allowed researchers to piece together the person’s nuclear DNA — the paired chromosomes inherited from both parents, which are stored in the nucleus of every cell. They also uncovered remains of additional Denisovan individuals, as well as those of a Neanderthal woman who lived in the cave tens of thousands of years earlier.

It turns out that Denisovans were a distinct lineage of protohuman that split off from Neanderthals about 400,000 years ago. Both groups shared a common ancestor who migrated out of Africa a few hundred thousand years before that. Their group split off lineage that led to Homo sapiens sometime in the past million years.

  

As a result, scientists like to compare the planet during that period to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth — except instead of hobbits, dwarves and elves, there were different kinds of humans.

Denisovans have been found only in that single cave. But Neanderthal fossils show they flourished in Eurasia, ranging in location from the British Isles to the mountains of Siberia until, about 40,000 years ago, they abruptly vanished from the face of the Earth.

Around the same time, the Eurasian population of a new primate — Homo sapiens — began to explode.

“Something happened that only we survived,” Pääbo speculated in 2010. He proposed a few possible narratives, all of them grim: Maybe modern humans out-competed our cousins for precious resources. Or maybe we just killed them.

But “Denisova 11” — the owner of the genome sequence reported Wednesday — highlights a more romantic, more complex and increasingly compelling story.

“This paper and other papers are showing the model of having isolated populations is not quite accurate,” said Emilia Huerta-Sanchez, a population geneticist at Brown University who was not involved in the new research. Huerta-Sanchez is among the scientists who do not consider Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans separate species.

“These other groups that coexisted with us . . . are part of our story,” she said.

…. This “admixture” — as such inter-population mating events are called — is not at all the same thing as a marriage between people of different ancestries.

And yet, the evidence suggests that when different hominids did meet, they recognized one another as fellow humans…..And now they live on in people today….WASHINGTON POST.”

Science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s is developing a great predictive track record: SPACE ODYSSEY predicted space travel, the dangers of Artificial Intelligence ( HAL) . and a religious epiphany for humanity out in space; SOYLENT GREEN predicted industrialized cannibalism to survive Climate Change, and SKULLDUGGERY predicted  admixing decades ahead of the proof.

We also know one thing about humanoids from the DNA record: "if you can be with the one you love, love the one you are with.”

Those TROPI females were really sexy, hairy but sexy.

sexy TROPIS from the film SKULLDUGGERY