Fossil Suggests Human, Ape Ancestor Hails From Asia

June 30, 2009 -- A new Myanmar fossil primate, Ganlea megacanina, suggests the common ancestor of humans, monkeys and apes evolved from large-toothed primates in Asia and not Africa, according to new research published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

If Myanmar, formerly called Burma, is confirmed as being the ancestral homeland of higher primates, or close to it, the discovery points to a circuitous migration route for some early primates, which must have gone to Africa and then come back to Asia.

Christopher Beard, lead author of the study, which was conducted under difficult conditions in rural areas, told Discovery News that the common ancestor to today's humans, monkeys and apes "would have lived in Asia."

"At some point later in time, probably only a few million years after Ganlea was alive, one or more primitive anthropoid primates, which would have been descendants of an earlier Asian ancestor, made their way from Asia to Africa," explained Beard, a Carnegie Museum of Natural History paleontologist.

"There, they continued to evolve, and some of them eventually became modern Old World monkeys, apes and humans," he added. "Living monkeys and apes like the orangutan that inhabit Asia returned there after evolving for millions of years in Africa."

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Beard and his international team came to this conclusion after studying the newly identified fossil primate, which lived 38 million years ago in a tropical floodplain similar to today's monkey-filled Amazon Basin of South America.

Heavy dental abrasion indicates Ganlea possessed enlarged canine teeth that it used to pry open the hard exteriors of tough tropical fruits to extract interior nuts and seeds. Among living and fossil primates, only anthropoids -- higher primates -- feed in such a manner.

"Ganlea has the right kind of anatomy, especially its monkey-like jaws and teeth, to be an animal that was very close to the common ancestor of living monkeys, apes and humans," Beard said. "Put simply, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's probably a duck, or in this case, a monkey!"

The discovery may take the spotlight off of "Ida," an ancient lemur-like animal from Germany that Jens Franzen of the Natural History Museum of Basel and his colleagues described earlier this year. Franzen and his team wrote that Ida was "not simply a fossil lemur, but part of a larger group of primates" that they and other scientists theorized could have led to the emergence of anthropoids.