Monkey Fossils Suggest Primates Came Out of Asia, Not Africa

[n2doc]

By Brandon Keim October 27, 2010



The discovery of four ancient, lemur-like creatures in what is now Libya suggests the human family tree’s taproot is in the Middle East, not Africa.

The conventional narrative of primate development places the origins of anthropoids — monkeys and apes, including humans — in Africa. Some paleontologists, however, think Asia is the more likely cradle for that ur-primate, or what Christopher Beard has called the “Dawn Monkey.”

Beard, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, is among the co-authors of the paper describing the new primates, published October 28 in Nature. The four species’ fossils, representing three distinct taxonomic families, are 40 million years old. Nothing similar was known to have lived in Africa at that time.

The diversity and timing of the new anthropoids raises two scenarios. Anthropoids might simply have emerged in Africa much earlier than thought, and gone undiscovered by modern paleontologists. Or they could have crossed over from Asia, where evidence suggests that anthropoids lived 55 million years ago, flourishing and diversifying in the wide-open ecological niches of an anthropoid-free Africa.



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[Enthusiast]

1. "But other paleontologists warn

that more investigation is required."

Gee, ya think? The fossil record is imperfect and incomplete. We may never know how anthropoids got to be so widely distributed. But we can take a clue from Madagascar. The fact that the Mozambique Channel has served as such a secure barrier to the migration of fauna indicates to me that primate ancestors must have been widely distributed before the breakup of Pangaea. That is a long time ago.