The discovery of fossils, more than 17 million years old, belonging to a new ape species in northern Egypt is shaking up ideas about the ancestry and dispersal of these early human relatives. A team of Egyptian and American palaeobiologists describes the new species Masripithecus moghraensis on 27 March in Science on the basis of a lower jaw, teeth and jaw fragments from Miocene deposits at Wadi Moghra, 200 kilometres north-west of Cairo. The small ape is several million years older than previously discovered ape fossils such as Kenyapithecus from East Africa, which, according to the authors, shifts the cradle of modern apes to North Africa.
‘An interesting find, because it raises new questions about the early evolution, biogeography and migration of apes’, says evolutionary biologist Yanell Braumuller of Naturalis, who studies, among other things, the later migration of Miocene apes in Turkey and Europe. ‘It also raises questions about their descent from the monkeys, whose oldest fossils have been found deeper within Africa’, Braumuller notes. He agrees with the Spanish palaeontologists David Alba and Júlia Aria-Martorell, who in an accompanying perspective describe the find as a ‘lesson in humility’. ‘It does indeed give reason for optimism that the fossils needed to complete the story of primate evolution may be lying somewhere we have barely begun to look’, says Braumuller.
The genus name Masripithecus of the new ape is partly derived from Arabic and means ‘ape from Egypt’, as does that of the well-known and far earlier extinct ape Aegyptopithecus.