We ran into something like this last year; took a while to sort out.
I have my doubts since afaik feathers only really evolved with the dinosaurs, who are not in our ancestry
pterosaurs did have proto feathers too, but only the ones closer to birds got asymmetrical “flight” feathers
Are you sure? Cause once there were dinos, and then not. And then there were humans, but never humans and dinos at the same time. So who nose, maybe there’s a homosaurus in our lineage /s
homosaurus sounds like a savage prehistoric slur
i also have my doubts. i suspect theyre being unnecessarily reductive in what they mean by “necessary genes”. they probably just mean our dna has encoding for all the proteins required to make feathers, but none of the developmental genes to create the specialized cells and tissues to actually do it. which i suspect means we’re missing most of the genes required to make feathers,
