Hybrids are a staple of human ingenuity, from the civilization of Babylon to today, they have been used as beasts of burden, warfare, or curious objects for scientific research. LILA Gazette explores.

By Eshan Lyall – 6th grade.

Hybrids have been a longstanding part of human history. The first hybrid, the Kunga,  was created in 2500 BC, and was the hybrid of a donkey and a Syrian Wild Ass (an equid that roams northern Africa and parts of the Middle east). The oldest hybrid still in existence is the mule (the hybrid of a male donkey and female horse), used as a load-bearing animal. Since then, they have mostly been equine hybrids. And, that has been the case because they are able to be bred without artificial insemination. 

The first more outlandish hybrid, the liger (female Lion, male Tiger) was theorized by French scientist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1798, and then created in a lab in 1948. This encouraged scientists around the world, and more hybrids soon followed, such as: the Tigon ( Male Lion, Female Tiger), the Wholphin ( Whale-dolphin) and the Zorse (Zebra-horse). These scientific attempts brought one important thing to mind: ligers, for example, put in the wild, could destroy both their parental ecosystems. 

Another danger of a different nature is that hybrids fuel imagination and hoaxes. It unfortunately comes with the territory. Among these hoaxes : the Dog-Human, the Mouse-Human, and the Shark-Horse. These have mostly been made up by TikTok conspiracy theorists to gain clicks and views. But one hybrid hoax that took the world by storm was the Humanzee.

This problem sprung from the fact that these hybrids could not exist in the wild at all without supplanting their prenatal species. That in turn made people realize that invasive species could easily destroy an ecosystem. Ligers are stronger than both their parental species physically, meaning that in the wild they could replace them, causing two animals to become extinct. Also their diets are skewed toward the diet of the lion, so if they go loose in a savannah, the ecosystem might recover, but in a jungle, then herbivore populations would skyrocket. Leading to plant shortages and a mass extinction. 

The Humanzee was a hoax about a hybrid of a human and a chimpanzee. According to a famous online conspiracy theory, it is supposed to have been created in a Chinese lab and then used for years for manual labor, filling the jobs that would be too hard, or too unethical for humans. More recently, another conspiracy theory stated that humanzees were supposedly created in a Canadian lab and then destroyed because they had violated the UN protocol that prohibits human gene editing. 

In conclusion, the wonderful world of hybrids can be an intriguing, but also a dangerous place. Full of fantastical creatures and strange hoaxes.. Hybrids may be amazing, but you have to be careful and skeptical of what you see or hear.