A newly identified fossil ape unearthed in northern Egypt is prompting scientists to reconsider long-standing assumptions about where the ancestors of modern apes, and ultimately humans, first emerged. Described in the journal Science by an international team from the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center in Egypt and the University of Southern California, the new species, named Masripithecus moghraensis, lived approximately 17 to 18 million years ago during the Early Miocene epoch, and is being described as the first definitive fossil ape known from North Africa.
The fossil, consisting of mandibular remains, was recovered from the Wadi Moghra site in the Qattara Depression of northern Egypt. For decades, the dominant scientific narrative has held that the ancestors of crown Hominoidea, the group encompassing all living apes, including gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans, originated and diversified primarily in East Africa. Early Miocene fossil sites in North Africa had, until now, yielded only fossil monkeys rather than apes, reinforcing the assumption that early apes were confined largely to Africa’s more southern reaches during this period.
The research team’s analysis places Masripithecus closer to the ancestry of living apes than any previously known East African species of comparable age, suggesting that North Africa and the wider Middle East region may have served as a crossroads, and possibly even a birthplace, for the ape lineage that eventually gave rise to modern hominoids. Hesham Sallam, a paleontologist at Mansoura University and the study’s senior author, said the team had spent five years searching for precisely this kind of fossil, explaining that a close look at the early ape family tree reveals an evident gap, one that the North African fossil record appears well placed to fill.
In a Perspective article accompanying the study in Science, researchers David Alba and Júlia Arias-Martorell wrote that the findings suggest palaeontologists may have been searching for the ancestors of crown hominoids in the wrong geographic region altogether. The discovery does not overturn the broader scientific consensus that the very earliest stem hominoids first appeared in the Afro-Arabian region during the Oligocene epoch, more than 25 million years ago; rather, it complicates the more specific question of where, within that broader African-Arabian landmass, the direct ancestors of modern apes took shape roughly ten million years later, during the Early Miocene.
Researchers say the discovery is likely to redirect palaeontological attention toward northern Africa and the Middle East, regions that have historically received far less fossil-hunting effort than East Africa’s well-studied Rift Valley sites. Because the geologically younger ape fossils known from Africa, Asia, and Europe already present a genuinely branching and at times contested evolutionary picture, scientists say further discoveries from underexplored North African sites could help resolve some of the longstanding uncertainty about how, and from where, the ancestors of modern apes and humans dispersed across the Old World roughly 14 to 16 million years ago.
– Rashmi Kumari
