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Researchers and scientists who have studied human origins have found many different theories as to how humans came about. Based on DNA, scientists have tied humans to chimpanzees. Now, according to a geneticist from the University of Georgia, humans might have come from pigs as well. The geneticist, Eugene McCarthy claims that humans are the result pig-chimp breeding.

McCarthy, who is one of the world's leading geneticists on the hybridization of animals, theorized on Macroevolution.net that a long time ago, a male pig mated with a female chimpanzee. Their offspring were humans. McCarthy bases his theory on the physical similarities between humans and pigs. He cites that these two species share hairless skin, large eyelashes and protruding noses. He also reports that the two species share similarities in their skin tissues and organs.

"Genetically, we're close to chimpanzees, and yet we have many physical traits that distinguish us from chimpanzees. One fact, however, suggests the need for an open mind: as it turns out, many features that distinguish humans from chimpanzees also distinguish them from all other primates. Features found in human beings, but not in other primates, cannot be accounted for by hybridization of a primate with some other primate. If hybridization is to explain such features, the cross will have to be between a chimpanzee and a non-primate - an unusual, distant cross to create an unusual creature," McCarthy wrote.

He added, according to the Times of India, "We believe that humans are related to chimpanzees because humans share so many traits with chimpanzees. Is it not rational then also, if pigs have all the traits that distinguish humans from other primates, to suppose that humans are also related to pigs? Let us take it as our hypothesis, then, that humans are the product of ancient hybridization between pig and chimpanzee."

Even though chimpanzees have long been categorized as a close relative to humans, the pig definitely has not. Genetics do not suggest that humans came from pigs. Furthermore, critics of this new theory stated that mating between two completely different animals is extremely rare. The chances that a pig and a chimpanzee mated and had offspring successfully are highly unlikely.

"Hybridizing a pig and a chimp is like taking half the dancers from a performance of Swan Lake and the other half from a performance of Giselle and throwing them together on stage to assemble something. It's going to be a catastrophe," a science blogger, P.Z. Myers wrote according to the New York Daily News.