Anthropologist Dan Gebo and colleagues report on this and other finds from a quarry in China in the Journal of Human Evolution and last week’s issue of Nature. Gebo’s team also found bones from extinct mammals called Eosimias at the quarry. These creatures resemble prosimians, but they’re the oldest-known members of the “anthropoid” primate branch–the group that includes monkeys, apes and humans. That makes Eosimias a crucial link in human evolution. “Without Eosimias,” says Gebo, “there are no monkeys, no apes and no humans.”
The new finds raise an interesting question. If humans originated in Africa, what are our precursors doing in Asia? Gebo guesses that early primates like Eosimias migrated from Asia to Africa, where they evolved into baboons, chimps and people. “The human evolutionary story begins in Africa–there’s no doubt about that,” says Gebo. If he and his colleagues are right, the prequel to that story was written halfway across the world.
