ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, September 30, 1996 TAG: 9609300118
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BOERNE, TEXAS
SOURCE: JOHN MacCORMACK SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS
NOTE: Above
OLIVER walks on his feet and has a smaller head than most apes, which resulted in a "strange and sordid history" for the animal.
His days on the freak circuit and on tabloid covers as the fabled ``missing link,'' are finally behind him, as are seven lost years in a medical research laboratory.
Now, Oliver, a mild-mannered, middle-aged ape who walks upright like a human, is taking a well-deserved Texas Hill Country retirement, but he is no less a scientific mystery than when he first appeared 25 years ago.
``Oliver's had a real strange and sordid history. He was exploited tremendously for his very unusual morphological characteristics,'' said Ken DeCroo, a California anthropologist and animal trainer who owned him a decade ago.
``His physical appearance was rather different than most chimps. He's bipedal, which means he walks on two feet, and that is very unusual. And another aspect is his very small head,'' he said.
Others have noted Oliver's peculiar smell, eye coloring, bird-like voice and various mannerisms as being very unchimplike.
And then there is Oliver's sense of himself.
``He was not like normal chimps, and other chimps didn't get along with him too well. He preferred to be with humans,'' recalled Bill Rivers, another former owner.
But Oliver has mellowed with the years.
Since May, when he and 11 other chimps were retired from the Buckshire Corp., a research center in Pennsylvania, Oliver has shared a spacious open-air cage with other chimps at Primarily Primates, just outside this town and about 25 miles northwest of San Antonio.
Wally Swett, director of the primate sanctuary, said his newest celebrity guest is adapting well, and, after years in isolation, has formed an attachment.
``He's bonded with one little female,'' said Swett.
Old news accounts assert that Oliver has 47 chromosomes, one more than a human, one less than a chimpanzee, but there are no records to confirm it.
Quite soon, possibly for the first time, Oliver will undergo sophisticated blood and genetic analysis to resolve, once and for all, exactly who or what he is.
``The prevailing view is that Oliver is simply a mutant chimp. Others think he may be a cross between a common chimp and a pygmy chimp, and soon we'll be able to make a determination,'' said Dr. Gordon Gallup, an anthropology professor at the University of New York at Albany.
But, said Gallup, who has lectured about Oliver in his evolutionary psychology course, there are other possibilities holding infinitely more complicated implications.
``It's difficult to know for sure, but I think there is reason to suspect that Oliver may be a human-chimpanzee hybrid. It turns out that humans and chimps are at least 99 percent identical in terms of basic biological chemistry, and you can get hybrids among much more diverse creatures than that,'' he said.
Rumors of such taboo experiments being conducted in China, Italy and the United States have persisted for years, but have never been acknowledged.
Could Oliver be the result of clandestine genetic alchemy?
The answer may come after a blood sample - to be taken from Oliver at an upcoming medical examination - is tested at the University of Chicago, allowing scientists there to finally determine his genetic pedigree.
``Let your imagination run wild. It has such mind-boggling implications for things like religion, and whether such a creature would be covered by the Bill of Rights. It could make people think about their relationship to evolution,'' said Gallup.
``But until there is some evidence either way, it's simply an academic exercise rather than anything you can take seriously,'' he said.
Dr. David Ledbetter, who will do the testing, said genetics technology will allow him to determine whether Oliver is a normal or mutant chimp, and if he proves to be a hybrid, his parentage.
``It seems a little silly to me to have all this rumor and controversy floating around when it's a very straightforward thing to do the chromosome analysis,'' he said.
A spokesperson for the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta, the most prestigious primate research facility in the country, said scientists there had never heard of Oliver.
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