The discovery of an ancient ape skull may challenge the long-held belief that the ancestors of apes and humans came from Africa, a controversial new study says.
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| The skull. (Sevim-Erol, A., Begun, D.R., Sözer, Ç.S. et al.) |
The partial skull of the ape, called an Anadoluvius turkae, was found in Cankiri, Turkey, and appears to date back to 8.7 million years ago, Live Science reported.
Meanwhile early hominins, which include humans, the African apes, and their fossil ancestors, are not seen in Africa until around seven million years ago.
The discovery challenges the widely-held view that the ancestors of African apes and humans originated exclusively in Africa.
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| The skull. (Sevim-Erol, A., Begun, D.R., Sözer, Ç.S. et al.) |
Researchers say that this suggests that hominins might have first evolved in Europe before migrating to Africa.
"Our findings further suggest that hominins not only evolved in western and central Europe but spent over five million years evolving there and spreading to the eastern Mediterranean before eventually dispersing into Africa, probably as a consequence of changing environments and diminishing forests," said Professor David Begun, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Toronto and co-senior author of the study, per The Telegraph.
"This new evidence supports the hypothesis that hominins originated in Europe and dispersed into Africa along with many other mammals between nine and seven million years ago, though it does not definitively prove it," he said.
In order to prove this, more fossils from Europe and Africa would need to be found from between seven and eight million years ago to try and find a link between the two groups, he added.
The finding suggested that the ape would have weighed around 110 to 130 pounds, possibly lived in a dry forest, and likely spent a lot of time on the ground.
The skull was found in 2015 but its significance was discussed in research recently published in the journal Communications Biology.
Other researchers have said that the findings do not challenge our understanding of the origins of humans.
"This has been a long-running debate regarding great ape and our origins," said Professor Chris Stringer, research leader in human evolution at the Natural History Museum in London, The Telegraph reported.
"I don't think this find changes much from the discussions (in a recent paper in the journal Science) which concluded: 'Current evidence suggests that hominins originated in Africa from Miocene ape ancestors unlike any living species.'"
This article was originally published by Business Insider.
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1 Comments
Original text from “The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex” Charles R. Darwin, Charles Murray, ed. Vol. 2, 1871, Page 199.
ReplyDelete“On the Birthplace and Antiquity of Man.—We are naturally led to enquire where was the birthplace of man at that stage of descent when our progenitors diverged from the Catarhine stock. The fact that they belonged to this stock clearly shews that they inhabited the Old World; but not Australia nor any oceanic island, as we may infer from the laws of geographical distribution. In each great region of the world the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region. It is therefore probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; and as these two species are now man's nearest allies, it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere. But it is useless to speculate on this subject, for an ape nearly as large as a man, namely the Dryopithecus of Lartet, which was closely allied to the anthropomorphous Hylobates, existed in Europe during the Upper Miocene period; and since so remote a period the earth has certainly undergone many great revolutions, and there has been ample time for migration on the largest scale.”
I am rather pleased to see that Darwin was correct again.