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.

That humans may trace their evolutionary lineage to creatures like the newly-discovered anthropoids, which likely weighed between four ounces and one pound and could sit in the palm of your hand, is an intriguing possibility. But other paleontologists warn that more investigation is required.

“These discoveries are exciting and very informative,” said Stony Brook University paleoanthropologist William Jungers, who was not involved in the study. But “more than anything else, these discoveries indicate that we still have a lot to learn.”

Image: Mark A. Klingler/Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

See Also:

• Humanity Has New 4.4 Million-Year-Old Baby Mama
• Bone Crunching Debunks ‘First Monkey’ Ida Fossil Hype
• ‘Lucy’s Grandfather’ Fossil Makes Humanity’s Ancestor Seem More Like Us

Citation: “Late middle Eocene epoch of Libya yields earliest known radiation of African anthropoids.” By Jean-Jacques Jaeger, K. Christopher Beard, Yaowalak Chaimanee, Mustafa Salem, Mouloud Benammi, Osama Hlal, Pauline Coster, Awad A. Bilal, Philippe Duringer, Mathieu Schuster, Xavier Valentin, Bernard Marandat, Laurent Marivaux, Eddy Metais, Omar Hammuda & Michel Brunet. Nature, Vol. 467 No. 1095, October 28, 2010.

Brandon’s Twitter stream, reportorial outtakes and citizen-funded White Nose Syndrome story; Wired Science on Twitter.

Authors: Brandon Keim

to know more click here