This week, Nature reports the discovery of several isolated teeth from 3-6 members of a newly identified Miocene ape speices, Chrororapithecus abyssinicus. The headlines aren’t any less sensational than last time, with the Canadian Broadcasting News being particularly egregious:
Sorry, no. There are much older fossils (dinosaurs, anyone?), some of which can be seen here.
The authors are a little more cautious. They’ve only got data on a few teeth, dating to around 10 mya, but they note dental morphological similarities between their find and modern gorillas.
Does this mean modern gorillas lived in Africa 10 mya? No. The authors conclude:
…the thick enamel of the…’functional’ side cusps, and the extremely low [enamel-dentine junction] (EDJ) topography seen in one of the upper molars (CHO-BT 4) indicates that Chororapithecus itself is probably too specialized to represent a direct ancestor to the modern gorilla (923).
It means there was an ape in the Miocene that likely had a similar diet to gorillas, and is a candidate as a distant relative. There is not sufficient evidence to prove that Chororapithecus is ancestral to gorillas.
What’s exciting about this find is the relative lack of fossils from this period in Africa. A lot of print space gets taken up with the newest hominin fossils, but they’re only the latest branch in the primate evolutionary lineage. The adaptive radiation of apes during the Miocene should provide fertile ground for studying the evolution and adaptation of primates.
–
Reference:Suwa G, Kono RT, Katoh S, Asfaw B, & Beyene Y (2007). A new species of great ape from the late Miocene epoch in Ethiopia. Nature, 448 (7156), 921-4 PMID: 17713533
Tags: adaptive-radiation, Anthropology, Evolution, fossil, primatology
Additional comments powered by BackType
No comments
Comments feed for this article
Trackback link: http://freethinkersasylum.com/2007/08/chororapithecus-abyssinicus/trackback/