New Scientist - USA (2013-06-08)

THIS WEEK

8 | NewScientist | 8 June 2013

• ”Archie” suggests primates evolved in Asia–

At 55 million years old, this primate

skeleton is the closest we’ve come to

discovering our origins

Humanity’s

earliest cousin

Colin Barras

OUR distant ancestors evolved not

in Africa but Asia, in a hothouse

world newly free of dinosaurs.

Over 55 million years ago, in the

lush rainforests of what is now

east Asia, a new voice was heard in

the animal chorus: the cry of the

first primate.

A fossil unveiled this week

might give us an idea of what this

crucial ancestor looked like. It is

the earliest primate skeleton ever

found. It also strongly suggests

that our lineage evolved in Asia,

several million years earlier

than we thought, and links the

evolution of primates to the most

extreme episode of climate

change of the last 65 million years.

“For the first time we can shine

a light on this critical part of the

[evolutionary] tree and say what

did these animals look like?” says

Christopher Beard at the Carnegie

Museum of Natural History in

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The

find, says Erik Seiffert of Stony

Brook University in New York,

who was not involved in the study,

is “undoubtedly one of the most

important discoveries in the

history of palaeoprimatology”.

Beard and his colleagues found

Archicebus achilles in eastern

China, just south of the Yangtze

river (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/

nature12200). It is 55 million years

old, has the relatively small eyes

of an animal active during the day

and the sharp molar teeth of an

insect-eater. Significantly, it also

has the hindlimbs and flexible

foot of a primate that had already

taken to leaping between branches

and gripping onto them with its

feet – characteristics that we only

lost when our ancestors left the

trees just a few million years ago.

In fact, a recent study revealed

that at least 1 in 13 of us still has a

flexible foot (New Scientist, 1 June,

“Archicebus is undoubtedly

one of the most important

discoveries in the history

of palaeoprimatology”

Paul Taffor

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