cyberdad wrote:
AnanstrixG wrote:
yes, we cant clone neanderthals from fragments of DNA. But sometime in the future it might be possible to activate sleeper genes (currently noncoding) that might code for a prehensile tail.
The only primates with prehensile tails are the New World Monkeys, so causing a human to grow a prehensile tail would be a much more complicated task than simply causing a human to grow a true tail.
True tails are incredibly uncommon (~40 cases documented). Soft tails are more common, but don't contain any caudal vertebrae.
There's a number of potential complications that are associated with true tails (spina bifida, potential issues with continence, etc). With that in mind bringing back our tails is probably not a worthwhile experiment to conduct on humans.
If bringing back our ancestral tails is a bad idea, hoping to upgrade them to be prehensile seems like an even worse experiment to try.
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