2023-08-29 10:45:56
Analysis of a European ape fossil suggests that the direct evolutionary ancestors of humans and African apes arose in Europe rather than Africa.
An ape fossil found at an 8.7-million-year-old paleontological site in Turkey challenges long-held ideas about human origins and bolsters the theory that the ancestors of apes and humans in Africa evolved in Europe before migrating to Africa between nine and seven million years ago.
The newly identified ape is called Anadoluvius turkae and was found at the Çorakyerler paleontological site.
The research has been carried out by a team consisting of, among others, David Begun from the University of Toronto in Canada, and Ayla Sevim Erol, from Ankara University in Turkey.
Begun and his colleagues have concluded that hominins not only arose in western and central Europe, but also spent more than five million years evolving there and spreading to lands in the eastern Mediterranean before eventually dispersing to Africa, probably as a consequence of environmental changes and forest loss.
These conclusions are based on the analysis of a very well preserved partial skull, discovered at the aforementioned paleontological site in 2015.
Fossil remains of the hominin Anadoluvius turkae, from the Çorakyerler paleontological site, located in Central Anatolia, Turkey. (Image: Sevim-Erol, A., Begun, DR, Sözer, Ç.S. et al. CC BY 4.0)
Anadoluvius was about the size of a large male chimpanzee (weighing around 50-60 kilograms), or even a female gorilla (averaging 75-80 kilograms), lived in a dry forest environment, and probably spent a lot of time on the ground instead of up in the trees.
Anadoluvius and other fossil apes from Greece (Ouranopithecus) and Bulgaria (Graecopithecus) form a group that comes close in many details of anatomy and ecology to the earliest known hominins or humans. The new fossils are the best-preserved specimens of this early hominin group and provide the strongest evidence to date that the group originated in Europe and then dispersed into Africa.
The study is entitled “A new ape from Türkiye and the radiation of late Miocene hominines”. And it has been published in the academic journal Communications Biology. (Source: NCYT by Amazings)
#origin #humanity #Europe #Africa