Mother of all apes—including humans—may have been surprisingly small
Mother of all apes—including humans—may have been surprisingly small
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This ancient ape had the face and small body of a gibbon, but a relatively large brain.
Marta Palmero / Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont (ICP)
This ancient a
pe had the face and small body of a gibbon, but a relatively large brain.
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By Ann Gibbons 29 October 2015 2:00 pm
From sturdy chimpanzees to massive gorillas to humans themselves, the living great apes are all large-bodied, weighing between 30 and 180 kilograms. So for years most researchers thought the ancestral ape must have tipped the scales as well. But the partial skeleton of an 11.6-million-year-old primitive ape may force scientists to reimagine the ancestor of all living apes and humans. With a muzzle like a gibbon but a large brain for its body size, the ancient primate has traits that link it to all apes and humans—yet it weighed only 4 kg to 5 kg, according to a report today in Science.
The ancient skeleton was found near Barcelona, Spain. If that seems strange, that’s because a bewildering number of extinct apes once roamed far and wide across the forests of Europe, Asia, and Africa during the Miocene Epoch, 5 million to 23 million years ago. After the ancestors of apes and monkeys split into two groups roughly 25 million years ago, apes underwent a remarkable florescence, evolving into more than 30 different types. About 17 million years ago, these early apes diverged into two distinct groups—the “lesser apes,” small-bodied, tree-living creatures represented today by gibbons and siamangs, and the great apes, which include chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans—and humans.
Until recently, most researchers assumed that the fossils of small Miocene apes were the ancestors of gibbons or extinct lineages of little primates, whereas the larger bodied fossil apes were the forebears of greater apes and humans. “For decades, the small stuff was thought to be related to gibbons and the big stuff was thought to be related to great apes,” says paleoanthropologist John Fleagle of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. And many researchers have thought that a large-bodied, 18-million-year-old ape called Proconsul from Kenya offered the best model for the ancestor of all apes.
This neat split is now being challenged by a strange new Miocene ape—Pliobates cataloniae, named for the province of Catalonia in Spain. In January 2011, a team of paleontologists monitoring bulldozers excavating a landfill 50 kilometers northwest of Barcelona found 70 crucial pieces of an ancient primate skeleton: the cranium (the top of the skull), chunks of the upper jaw and muzzle, plus arm, hand, and hind bones, all buried in a layer of sediment reliably dated to 11.6 million years ago.
More:
http://news.sciencemag.org/evolution/2015/10/mother-all-apes-including-humans-may-have-been-surprisingly-small
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Presidentus Idioticus sawed off the branch of the evolutionary tree upon which he was perched.
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