Oliver the Humanzee

The other night, Dave was watching the Science channel. I'm finding myself more and more intrigued by this channel; it has lots of cool shows on space and evolution and stuff... so right after the "Neanderthal: The Rebirth" show (which was totally weird and creepy in itself), this program, "Humanzees," comes on.

It's about the possibility of human-chimpanzee hybrids. And it featured Oliver.

Oliver is this strange creature from Africa that came to the USA in the 70s, and scientists were questioning whether or not he was half human, half chimpanzee. They hinted that by the end of the show, DNA test results would be revealed to explain the truth behind dear Oliver.

Oliver looks more like a human than any monkey I've ever seen. In addition, he walked upright, liked to mix drinks and smoke cigars, enjoyed suspenders to hold up his pants, and preferred the company of humans to chimps. Especially female humans (consequently Oliver had to be sold from his first owners because he basically tried to rape his first owner's wife).

So, as tired as I am, I wait around while they show some crazy dude rolling around on the grass with a fullly grown lion and tiger, and it's ridiculously huge offspring, the Liger... and certainly not wait while they kill time explaining mules (a hybrid of donkeys and horses), while coming to the conclusion (duh) that there is no scientific reason that Humanzees cannot also exsit. Yet I find myself fascinated. Intrigued. Totally into this program. I can't stop watching. Not to mention that my darling fiance is dancing around the room like a monkey (come to think of it, he looks strangely like Oliver... bald head and such...) and saying, "is it a monkey? is it a human? is it a monkey?" and so on and so forth. So we're hooked.

Unfortunately, I fell asleep before the program ended. So I don't know if Oliver is indeed a human, a chimpanzee, or a humanzee. I guess I'll never know. (or I could certainly google it and find out, but what fun would that be?!)

However last night at dinner, I'm trying to explain this show to Jami and Mo, and they are in absolute hysterics. But I guess you'd have to see it to believe it. They start asking lots of questions, and I'm having trouble answering them with a straight face, so I promise them that as soon as I can, I will enlighten them about Oliver with some solid info.

Well today I came into work to find some links for Jami and Mo about Oliver, and I came across this:

http://cecimoz.co.uk/portal.php?page=3

Apparently I'm not the only person who found Oliver so interesting.