By Steve Connor, Science Editor They range in size from the tiny Madame Berthe's mouse lemur, weighing little more than an ounce, to the 440lb mountain gorilla. And the primate species, of course, incorporates humans, once famously described as the "third chimpanzee" because of the close genetic similarity with the two living species of chimp, the common chimp and the bonobo. Even without the human component, the primates would include some of the most intelligent life forms on the planet and their extraordinary success is largely down to their relatively large brains, binocular vision and ability to grasp and manipulate objects between their four digits and opposable thumb. Now for the first time scientists have drawn a comprehensive family tree of all living species of primates based on a systematic analysis of scores of key genes embedded within their DNA. It shows that Homo sapiens is just one of dozens of primate species that share a common ancestor, probably a small, shrew-like creature that lived during the age of the dinosaurs some 85 million years ago. The complete phylogenetic tree of primates, published in the online journal PLoS Genetics, is based on a comparative analysis of some 54 separate gene regions within the genomes of 186 species of living primates covering the entire family tree, from the smallest lemur to the largest great ape. Scientists believe the study can, for the first time, accurately place Man within the much bigger and more complex tree of relationships that define primates. It should, they insist, provide invaluable insights into early human origins, as well as the diseases we share with our closest relatives. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15117 - Posted: 03.19.2011

Matt Kaplan The logical argument that ancient human ancestors had to have mastered fire before departing balmy Africa for the often freezing climes of Europe is being challenged by a review revealing that there is no evidence to support the idea. Exactly when fire became a tool in the hominin toolbox is a thorny issue. Unlike stone tools, which hold together reasonably well over the course of time and can be dated as having been in hominin hands for at least 2.6 million years, the ash and charcoal that are often the only remains from ancient fires are rare in the fossil record as they are easily destroyed by the elements. Yet because fire makes food so much more energy efficient to consume and has such a key role in providing warmth, most anthropologists have agreed that hominins had to have mastered fire before they headed into Europe. "We assumed fire had to be an element of the human toolkit to survive northern-latitude winters," says archaeologist, Francesco d'Errico at the University of Bordeaux in France. As logical as the argument seems, the review, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1, suggests that it is wrong. Wil Roebroeks at Leiden University in the Netherlands and Paola Villa at the University of Colorado Museum in Boulder, searched the European archaeological record for fires and found that the earliest possible evidence comes from two 400,000-year-old sites, one in England that seems to have the remains of an ancient hearth and one in Germany that has a charred wooden tool and heated flint present. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15106 - Posted: 03.15.2011

By NICHOLAS WADE Every time some human attribute is said to be unique, whether tool-making or language or warfare, biologists soon find some plausible precursor in animals that makes the ability less distinctive. Still, humans are vastly different from other animals, however hard the difference may be to define. A cascade of events, some the work of natural selection, some just plain accidents, propelled the human lineage far from the destiny of being just another ape, down an unexpected evolutionary path to become perhaps the strangest blossom on the ample tree of life. And what was the prime mover, the dislodged stone that set this eventful cascade in motion? It was, perhaps, the invention of weapons — an event that let human ancestors escape the brutal tyranny of the alpha male that dominated ape societies. Biologists have little hesitation in linking humans’ success to their sociality. The ability to cooperate, to make individuals subordinate their strong sense of self-interest to the needs of the group, lies at the root of human achievement. “Humans are not special because of their big brains,” says Kim Hill, a social anthropologist at Arizona State University. “That’s not the reason we can build rocket ships — no individual can. We have rockets because 10,000 individuals cooperate in producing the information.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15103 - Posted: 03.15.2011

by Sara Reardon Most male mammals wield a penis covered with spines made of keratin, the same material that forms fingernails, to sweep out competitors' sperm and irritate a female into ovulating. You can add humans' lack of penile spines to the list of ways we are misfits among primates, along with our absence of tails and fur. Even chimpanzees, our closest relatives, have penile spines. A new study suggests that this feature disappeared due to a chunk of DNA that went missing after our evolutionary divergence from chimps. The researchers have identified another DNA deletion that may have contributed to humans' bigger brains. The question of what makes us distinctly human is hardly a new one, of course, but developmental genomicist Gill Bejerano and developmental geneticist David Kingsley, both of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, decided to look at the issue from another angle. Maybe humans don't have an advantage over chimps genetically, as we often like to think we do—maybe we've actually lost something. Bejerano and Kingsley compared the chimp genome with the human genome, looking for DNA regions that chimps had but humans did not. And rather than looking at genes, as most research in the past has done, they examined DNA regions that don't code for genes but instead regulate how nearby genes are expressed. They found 583 deletions in the human genome, and Bejerano says choosing which to study first was a tough decision. "Each region could be its own adventure," he says. They ended up choosing two: a deleted region near a gene for male hormone response and a region close to a gene involved in brain development. The Neandertal genome also lacks these regions, indicating that these deletions occurred more than half a million years ago. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15088 - Posted: 03.10.2011

Scientists have discovered what they say are four different species of "zombie fungus" in the Brazilian rainforest, which take over the brains of their host ants, forcing them to move to a location ideally suited to the fungus before killing them. In a study published March 2 in the journal Plos ONE, researchers from Brazil, the United Kingdom and the United States say they began to investigate after noticing different types of fungus growing out of the bodies of carpenter ants. "This so-called zombie or brain-manipulating fungus alters the behaviour of the ant host, causing it to die in an exposed position, typically clinging onto and biting into the adaxial surface of shrub leaves," the authors write. The fungus then grows — usually out of the ant's head and neck region — and releases its spores. The fungus, Ophiocordyceps, was originally thought to be a single species, but the researchers determined that there were actually four species at work. "It is tempting to speculate that each species of fungus has its own ant species that it is best adapted to attack," study leader David Hughes, an entomologist at Penn State University, told National Geographic. "This potentially means thousands of zombie fungi in tropical forests across the globe await discovery," he told the magazine. "We need to ramp up sampling - especially given the perilous state of the environment." © CBC 2011

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15086 - Posted: 03.08.2011

by Virginia Morell Elephants know when they need a helping hand—or rather, trunk. That's the conclusion of a new study that tested the cooperative skills of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) in Thailand and showed that the pachyderms understand that they will fail at a task without a partner's assistance. The ability to recognize that you sometimes need a little help from your friends is a sign of higher social cognition, psychologists say, and is rarely found in other species. Elephants now join an elite club of social cooperators: chimpanzees, hyenas, rooks, and humans. To test the elephants' cooperation skills, a team of scientists modified a classic experiment first administered to chimpanzees in the 1930s, which requires two animals work together to earn a treat. If they don't cooperate, neither gets the reward. For the elephants, the researchers used a sliding table with a single rope threaded around it. Two bowls of corn were attached to the table, but the elephants could reach them only by pulling two ends of the rope simultaneously. Working with mahout—Asian elephant trainers—trained elephants at the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in Lampang, the researchers first taught individual animals to pull the rope with their trunks. The 12 elephants were then divided into six pairs, and each pair was released to walk to their waiting ropes. If one animal pulled the rope before the other, the rope would slip out, leaving the table—and treats—in place. "That taught them to pull together," says Joshua Plotnik, a postdoc in experimental psychology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and the lead author of the study, which appears online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 15085 - Posted: 03.08.2011

by Elizabeth Pennisi Every year, some 50 billion birds take to the air for their seasonal migrations. They may go 500 kilometers in a day and a few even travel from pole to pole. But how do they know when, where, and how far to fly? Although some of the answer lies in their DNA, nobody knew which genes or how they worked. Now ornithologists have pinned down one of those genes, and strange as it may sound, the length of that gene influences the length of the flights. "If we understand the genetics underlying migratory behavior, we can understand more about how and why migration evolves," says Chris Guglielmo, who studies bird migration at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. "We may also be better able to understand how quickly migration can disappear in response to climate change." As the moment for migration approaches, birds bulk up, adding muscle and fat. They hop and flap restlessly at night, shifting their internal clocks in anticipation of nighttime flights. Breeding experiments have shown that these shifts have a genetic basis, as do the timing, amount, and intensity of flights. Since the 1970s, ornithologists at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Starnberg, Germany, have studied European blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla), a common warbler in Europe, which typically head to the Mediterranean for the winter. Some blackcaps had established a new wintering area in the past few decades. The researchers wanted to know the genetic basis for the change. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Migration; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15014 - Posted: 02.17.2011

By Jennifer Viegas As Valentine's Day cards attest, humans value love and friendship that aren't just forged by family ties, common interests or sexual attraction. Now researchers have determined that such human-like friendships exist among at least five different types of animals. Prior studies determined that elephants, dolphins, some carnivores and certain non-human primates, such as chimpanzees, have the ability -- just as humans do -- to maintain enduring friendships in highly dynamic social environments. A new study, published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, adds bats to that list. Female wild Bechstein's bats prefer to literally hang out with certain friends while they also keep loose ties to the rest of their colony. Lead author Gerald Kerth told Discovery News that these bat buddies mirror human ones. Despite all of their "daily chaos, the bats are able to maintain long-term relationships," he said. "We do not work, play and live together with the same individuals all the time during the day and week," he explained. "But nevertheless, we are able to maintain long-term relationships with our friends and our family despite our often chaotic and highly dynamic social lives." Kerth, a professor at the University of Greifswald's Zoological Institute, and colleagues Nicolas Perony and Frank Schweitzer monitored colonies of the bats over a period of five years. Male bats of this species are solitary, but females roost together in bat boxes and tree cavities. They preferred certain companions over the years. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Evolution
Link ID: 14978 - Posted: 02.10.2011

Human brains have shrunk over the past 30,000 years, puzzling scientists who argue it is not a sign we are growing dumber but that evolution is making the key motor leaner and more efficient. The average size of modern humans -- Homo sapiens -- has decreased about 10 percent during that period -- from 1,500 to 1,359 cubic centimeters (91 to 83 cubic inches), the size of a tennis ball. Women's brains, which are smaller on average than those of men, have experienced an equivalent drop in size. These measurements were taken using skulls found in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. "I'd called that a major downsizing in an evolutionary eye blink," John Hawks of the University of Michigan told Discover magazine. But other anthropologists note that brain shrinkage is not very surprising since the stronger and larger we are, the more gray matter we need to control this larger mass. The Neanderthal, a cousin of the modern human who disappeared about 30 millennia ago for still unknown reasons, was far more massive and had a larger brain. The Cro-Magnons who left cave paintings of large animals in the monumental Lascaux cave over 17,000 years ago were the Homo sapiens with the biggest brain. They were also stronger than their modern descendants. Psychology professor David Geary of the University of Missouri said these traits were necessary to survive in a hostile environment. He has studied the evolution of skull sizes 1.9 million to 10,000 years old as our ancestors and cousins lived in an increasingly complex social environment. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Evolution; Intelligence
Link ID: 14967 - Posted: 02.08.2011

By NATALIE ANGIER Amid all the psychosocial caterwauling these days over the relative merits of tiger mothers and helicopter dads, allow me to make a pitch for the quietly dogged parenting style of the New Caledonian crow. In the complexity, fluidity and sophistication of their tool use, their ability to manipulate and bird-handle sticks, leaves, wires, strings and any other natural or artificial object they can find into the perfect device for fishing out food, or fishing out second-, third- or higher-order tools, the crows have no peers in the nonhuman vivarium, and that includes such textbook dexterous smarties as elephants, macaques and chimpanzees. Videos of laboratory studies with the crows have gone viral, showing the birds doing things that look practically faked. In one famous example from Oxford University, a female named Betty methodically bends a straight piece of wire against the outside of a plastic cylinder to form the shape of a hook, which she then inserts into the plastic cylinder to extract a handled plug from the bottom as deftly as one might pull a stopper from a drain. Talking-cat videos just don’t stand a chance. So how do the birds get so crafty at crafting? New reports in the journals Animal Behaviour and Learning and Behavior by researchers at the University of Auckland suggest that the formula for crow success may not be terribly different from the nostrums commonly served up to people: Let your offspring have an extended childhood in a stable and loving home; lead by example; offer positive reinforcement; be patient and persistent; indulge even a near-adult offspring by occasionally popping a fresh cockroach into its mouth; and realize that at any moment a goshawk might swoop down and put an end to the entire pedagogical program. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Intelligence
Link ID: 14946 - Posted: 02.03.2011

A person's friends tend to share certain genes in common with each other — but not always with the individual, a new study suggests. "People’s friends may not only have similar traits, but actually resemble each other on a genotypic level," said the study led by James Fowler, a geneticist at the University of California at San Diego. The findings were published Friday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers noticed two distinct patterns within social networks when it came to the genes DRD2, which has been linked to alcoholism, and CYP2AP, which is linked with the character trait of openness. In the case of DRD2, people with the marker tend to make friends with those who also have that marker. People without it tend to make friends with other DRD2-negative individuals. In the case of CYP2A6, the person who has the gene tends to be the hub of a social network made up of people who don't have it and instead share the opposite genotype. Four other genes examined by the researchers did not show such patterns among groups of friends. The analysis found that this gene clustering within social networks was apparent even when the researchers took into account the fact that people are more likely to make friends with people who live near them. The findings suggest that studies linking certain traits to genes may be biased in ways that were not previously anticipated. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14885 - Posted: 01.18.2011

By CARL ZIMMER Deep in a cave in the forests of northern Spain are the remains of a gruesome massacre. The first clues came to light in 1994, when explorers came across a pair of what they thought were human jawbones in the cave, called El Sidrón. At first, the bones were believed to date to the Spanish Civil War. Back then, Republican fighters used the cave as a hide-out. The police discovered more bone fragments in El Sidrón, which they sent to forensic scientists, who determined that the bones did not belong to soldiers, or even to modern humans. They were the remains of Neanderthals who died 50,000 years ago. Today, El Sidrón is one of the most important sites on Earth for learning about Neanderthals, who thrived across Europe and Asia from about 240,000 to 30,000 years ago. Scientists have found 1,800 more Neanderthal bone fragments in the cave, some of which have yielded snippets of DNA. But the mystery has lingered on for 16 years. What happened to the El Sidrón victims? In a paper this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Spanish scientists who analyzed the bones and DNA report the gruesome answer. The victims were a dozen members of an extended family, slaughtered by cannibals. “It’s an amazing find,” said Todd Disotell, an anthropologist at New York University. Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum of London said the report “gives us the first glimpse of Neanderthal social structures.” Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14806 - Posted: 12.22.2010

By NICHOLAS WADE Taiwanese researchers have managed to bar code some 16,000 of the 100,000 neurons in a fruit fly’s brain and to reconstruct the brain’s wiring map. In terms similar to those that define computers, the team describes the general architecture of the fly’s brain as composed of 41 local processing units, 58 tracts that link the units to other parts of the brain, and six hubs. Biologists see this atlas of the fly brain as a first step toward understanding the human brain. Six of the chemicals that transmit messages between neurons are the same in both species. And the general structure — two hemispheres with copious cross-links — is also similar. “I think this is the beginning of a new world,” said Ralph Greenspan, a neurobiologist at the University of California, San Diego. Biologists should now be able to match the fruit fly’s well-studied behaviors to the brain circuits established by the new atlas, he said. The atlas is maintained on a supercomputer in Taiwan which fly biologists around the world can query. They can also add to the atlas by uploading their own images of fruit fly neurons. “So I think this will really accelerate progress,” said Josh Dubnau, a neurobiologist at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. The Taiwan team is led by Ann-Shyn Chiang, who has been working on the project for the last decade. He has assembled a group of 40 people, who include computer programmers and engineers, working on a budget of about $1 million a year. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14774 - Posted: 12.14.2010

by Robert Adler They were technologically savvy, creative and cultured. So maybe it's time we accepted that Neanderthals were people just like us EVER since the first fossils of a brawny, low-browed, chimp-chested hominin were unearthed in Germany in 1856, Neanderthals have stirred both fascination and disdain. German pathologist Rudolf Virchow decreed that the bones belonged to a wounded Cossack whose brow ridges reflected years of pain-driven frowns. French palaeontologist Marcellin Boule recognised the fossils as ancient, but ignored signs that the specimen he studied suffered from arthritis. It was he who reconstructed the bent-kneed, shambling brute that still lurks in the back of most people's minds. Irish geologist William King found the creature so ape-like that he considered putting it into a new genus. In the end he merely relegated it to a separate species, Homo neanderthalensis. Since then, hundreds of Neanderthal sites have been excavated. These show that Neanderthals occupied much of modern-day Eurasia, from the British Isles to Siberia, and from the Red Sea to the North Sea. Here they survived 200,000 years or more of climatic chaos before eventually disappearing around 30,000 years ago. The long-held view that Neanderthals were inferior to Homo sapiens is changing as, one by one, capabilities thought unique to us have been linked to them. What's more, the two species clearly crossed paths, and the publication of the Neanderthal genome earlier this year shows that they interbred. We share over 99 per cent of our genes with Neanderthals, and after splitting from a common ancestor almost 500,000 years ago anatomically modern humans met and mated with Neanderthals, most likely in the Middle East around 45,000 years ago. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14747 - Posted: 12.07.2010

Jeremy Laurance Why do beautiful people have more daughters? Because beauty is more important for a woman than a man, according to evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa. Why are most suicide bombers Muslim? Because they don't get enough sex. Why are liberals more intelligent than conservatives? Because liberalism is "evolutionarily novel." The London School of Economics researcher and author of Ten Politically Incorrect Truths about Human Nature is accustomed to defending his provocative assertions against outraged critics. He acknowledges that some of his ideas may seem "immoral, contrary to our ideals or offensive". But he insists they are true and supported by scientific evidence that he has continued to collect since his book was published in 2007. "Like it or not, human nature is simply not politically correct," he says. Now, in a study to be published in Reproductive Sciences, he has adduced new evidence for what he describes as one of the most celebrated principles in evolutionary biology which explains why attractive people have more female children. So how does the research stack up? 1 Beautiful people have more daughters Known as the Trivers-Willard hypothesis this states that if parents have any traits they can pass on to their children and that will be better for one sex than the other, they they will have more children of that sex. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14721 - Posted: 11.30.2010

by Greg Miller Elephants are famous for having a good memory, but they also have complex communication skills and rich social lives. Unfortunately, scientists know virtually nothing about the 5-kilogram brain responsible for these talents. This week, in a presentation at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and in a paper in Brain Structure and Function, scientists present the first microscopic study of neurons in the cerebral cortex of the African elephant. The cortex is the thin layer of cells on the surface of the brain that governs many functions, and in elephants it contains a greater variety of cell types (such as the extensively branched neuron pictured above) than is found in more frequently studied animals such as rodents and primates. How this complexity contributes to an elephant's smarts isn't known, but the authors say their findings suggest that evolution has found multiple ways to build a complex brain—and an intelligent beast. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14692 - Posted: 11.20.2010

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS Jane Goodall went to the Gombe Stream Reserve near Lake Tanganyika in East Africa when she was 26. By living among the animals and quietly recording their interactions, she was able to show that the chimp world included love, hate, fear, jealousy, tool use, brutality, even warfare. I spoke with Dr. Goodall last month at Western Connecticut State College, where she was giving a lecture, and then later by telephone. A condensed version of the conversations follows: Q. In July you celebrated the 50th anniversary of your first trip to Gombe Stream Reserve. When you arrived there in 1960, could you have imagined the life that lay ahead? A. Of course not. I was a young girl, straight from England, more or less, no degree of any sort, and Louis Leakey was giving me this amazing opportunity to live with the animal most like us. There’d been no long-term studies of great apes. The longest had been George Schaller, with mountain gorillas, and he’d stayed a year. I think Louis Leakey thought the study might last 10 years. But at 26, I thought perhaps three. And then the more I learned about chimpanzees, the more I realized there was more to learn — until I couldn’t stop. Q. So you got to Gombe, and very soon, you observed something astounding: Chimpanzees used tools to fish for ants. A. I went in July. And tool-making was toward the end of October. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14674 - Posted: 11.16.2010

by Jennifer Carpenter As surprising at it may seem, wasps, bees, and even ants have relatively large and complex brains. That allows these "social insects" to keep track of the intricate relationships between the thousands of individuals in their colony—or so researchers thought. A new study indicates that these insects didn't grow big brains to cope with social living; they evolved them millions of years earlier when they were solitary parasites. The link between brain size and social living was first noted in 1850, when scientists identified mushroom bodies in the insect brain. Aptly named because they're shaped like mushrooms, the structures contain thousands of neurons responsible for processing and remembering smells and sights. Social insects tend to have larger mushroom bodies than solitary ones, leading researchers to believe that the transition from solitary to social living increased the size of these brain regions. But Sarah Farris has found a different explanation. Instead of comparing social insects with solitary ones, Farris, a neurobiologist at West Virginia University in Morgantown, looked into the past. To get a sense of how the wasp brain evolved over time, she and taxonomist Susanne Schulmeister of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City compared the mushroom bodies of parasitic wasps with those of nonparasitic wasps, which represent the very oldest form of wasp. The parasitic wasps had consistently larger and more elaborate mushroom bodies than the nonparasites, the duo reports online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. In particular, the caps, called calyces, of the parasitic mushroom bodies were twice the size of nonparasites. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14656 - Posted: 11.11.2010

by Ann Gibbons With brains as big as ours, Neandertals were no dumb brutes. But their brains may have developed in a manner much different from the way ours do, according to anew study. The differences suggest that Neandertals did not see the world the same way we do and may not have been as adept at language or forming complex social networks. Paleoanthropologists Jean—Jacques Hublin, Philipp Gunz, and Simon Neubauer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, made the find by first comparing CT scans of the brains of 58 humans and 60 chimps, varying in age from birth to adulthood. The researchers used three—dimensional imaging and several hundred landmarks on the braincases to match the brains accurately despite differences in size. As the team reports this month in the Journal of Human Evolution, humans—but not chimps—preferentially expand their parietal lobes and cerebellums and widen their temporal lobes in the first year of life. This results in the characteristic rounded dome of our skulls. In another study published online today in Current Biology, the researchers and a colleague used the same imaging methods to study nine fossil Neandertals, including a newborn, a year—old baby, and three children. Because the brain does not fossilize, they studied endocasts, imprints of the brain left in the skull. They found that at birth, both Neandertal and modern human infants had elongated braincases that were similar in shape, although Neandertal faces were already larger. But by age 1 or so, modern humans had grown globular brains, whereas Neandertal babies had not; like chimpanzees, they did not show the preferential bulging in the parietal and cerebellar regions, even though the brain grew overall. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14648 - Posted: 11.09.2010

By SINDYA N. BHANOO The ancestors of humans and other primates like apes and monkeys may have originated in Asia, not Africa, a new study in the journal Nature reports. There has long been debate about the matter, but a recent discovery of anthropoid fossils including two previously unidentified species and one known species provides new clues. The fossils are about 38 million years old and were uncovered in a rock formation in southern Libya. The anthropoids were small, rodent-size creatures that looked similar to larger, modern-day primates, but weighed just 4 to 17 ounces. “At least one of these anthropoids appears to be clearly related to the older Asian form described in Myanmar,” said Jean-Jacques Jaeger, a paleontologist at the University of Poitiers in France and the study’s lead author. “This indicates that there was migration from Asia.” But there is another possibility: that the anthropoids originated in Africa and migrated to Asia, and that they have even older ancestors in Africa that have not yet been discovered. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14611 - Posted: 11.01.2010