Scientists have discovered an ancient relative of all living apes in northern Egypt, highlighting how the hunt for human evolutionary history spans well beyond celebrated fossils found in east Africa.
The newly-identified specimen known as Masripithecus is estimated to be 17mn to 18mn years old and suggests modern apes including people may have originated in the Afro-Arabian region well north of countries such as Ethiopia and Kenya, the researchers said.
The revelation underscores the potentially wide geographic scope for investigations of where exactly the last common — or “crown” — ancestor of humans and other hominoid primates such as gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans came from.
The find “opens a window into a region that has been largely missing from the story”, said Shorouq Al-Ashqar, lead author of a paper on Masripithecus published in Science on Thursday.
“This discovery suggests that early apes, including those close to the lineage leading to all living apes, may have been more widespread than we previously thought,” said Ashqar, a researcher in the Vertebrate Paleontology Centre of Egypt’s Mansoura University. “It encourages us to expand our search and not be limited by the current fossil record.”
The scientists unearthed the remains in the fossil-rich Wadi Moghra region of the Qattara Depression, a desert area in Egypt. They dated the finding to after a crucial period when Afro-Arabia became attached to Eurasia, allowing apes to spread eastwards.
Masripithecus’s name is a bilingual fusion of the Arabic for “Egypt” and the Greek for “monkey” or “trickster”.
The discovery adds intriguing possibilities to where and when the first apes that emerged about 20mn or more years ago developed into the human evolutionary branch of the family.
The find confirmed paleontologists “might have been looking for crown-hominoid ancestors in the wrong place,” according to an accompanying commentary published in Science.
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Masripithecus was an “important discovery for our understanding of ape evolution”, said Fred Spoor, an expert in early human evolution at the UK’s National History Museum.
It highlighted the need for “practical opportunities to look for and find fossils” given that “frustratingly large” areas of Africa — such as the Congo Basin — still lacked such finds, he said.
The Masripithecus finding was “welcome and exciting” and needed to be compared carefully with other ancient ape fossils, said Scott Williams, associate professor of anthropology at New York University.
The “bulk of the evidence” still pointed to ape and human origins in Africa, he added, noting that Masripithecus was found on the continent rather than further north-east.
“The earliest fossil apes are found there [in Africa], as are the earliest members of our hominin lineage,” he said. “I do not think we’ve been looking in the wrong place, but I do think there are places where fossils exist but haven’t yet been found.”