11-million-year-old primate discovered

Washington, April 22 (ANI): Scientists have discovered an eleven-million-year-old new primate in a garbage dump in Catalonia, Spain.

Named Pliopithecus canmatensis, after the site (Can Mata in the Valles-Penedes basin), the primate belonged to an extinct family of Old World monkeys, Catarrhini, which dispersed from Africa to Eurasia.

Scientists were able to ID the monkey from fragments of its jaw and molars.

The new species, according to the scientists, sheds light on the evolution of the superfamily Pliopithecoidea, primates that include animals that diverged before the separation of the two current superfamilies: the cercopithecoids (Old World monkeys) and the hominids (anthromorphs and humans). It thrived in Eurasia during the Early and Late Miocene, or between 23.5 and 5.3 million years ago.

"Based on the anatomical, palaeobiographical and biostratigraphic information available, the most probable evolutionary scenario for this group is that the Pliopithecoidea were the first Catarrhini to disperse from Africa to Eurasia, where they experienced an evolutionary radiation in a continent initially deserted of other anthropoids (apes)," David Alba, the project leader and a researcher at the Catalan Institute for Palaeontology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), aid.

According to the new study, the subfamily to which this particular species belonged originated from an ancestor called the dionsisopithecine in Asia. This ancestor led to animals that later moved into Europe around 15 million years ago.

Fifteen to eleven million years is somewhat a drop in the time bucket for primate evolution, however. One of the world's oldest primate-like animals was Plesiadapis, which lived 58 to 55 million years ago. So primate history, our history, goes back a very long time.

The study has been published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. (ANI)