The discovery of a mysterious 18-million-year-old ape fossil in Egypt suggests that the ancestors of all modern apes, including humans, may have originated in northeast Africa or Arabia, a new study has found.
“The discovery of ape fossils in this region is both important and somewhat surprising,” the study’s lead author, paleontologist Shoruk Al-Ashkar of Egypt’s Mansoura University, told Live Science in an email. “But it also highlights how incomplete our images are.”
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Previous research has established that great apes first appeared at least 25 million years ago. They quickly flourished, diversified into dozens of species, and spread throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia.
However, relatively few of these ancient apes were on the evolutionary line that led to modern apes. Modern apes include humans and other great apes, along with gibbons and siamangs. Furthermore, our ape ancestors appear to have been confined primarily to East Africa. As such, the area has long been considered a good place to explore the origins of modern apes.
But after discovering the fossilized remains of apes who lived in what is now northern Egypt 17 to 18 million years ago, al-Ashkar and colleagues challenged this idea in a study published March 26 in the journal Science.
The remains, discovered in 2023 and 2024, are very incomplete, with only fragments of lower jaw bone and some worn teeth. However, al-Ashkar and his colleagues proved that the remains did not belong to any known ape. The researchers assigned the fossil to a new genus and species: Maslipithecus mograensis. The genus name means “Egyptian monkey or trickster” in Arabic and Greek, and the species name refers to the “Wadi Mole” where it was discovered.
The discovery is important, said biological anthropologist Sergio Almecija of Spain’s Miquel Crusafont Catalan Institute of Paleontology. However, he was not involved in this research. “New discoveries of ape fossils are valuable because of their rarity, especially when they come from areas where their presence has previously gone unnoticed,” he told Live Science via email.
To determine where M. mograensis fits into the ape evolutionary tree, Al-Ashkar and his colleagues looked at the age and anatomy of different ape fossils, as well as the evolutionary information contained in the DNA of living apes.
This analysis places M. mograensis in the ancestral lineage of modern apes, just before the split into the great ape group and Gibbons siamang (the “minor ape” group). This means that M. moghraensis was very closely related to the last common ancestor of all modern apes. This suggests that this common ancestor must have lived in approximately the same location as M. moghraensis.
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“The highest odds are [that it lived] in the northern part of the Afro-Arabian continent,” study co-author Eric Seifert, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, told Live Science via email.
However, not everyone agrees with this interpretation. Almesiya describes it as “a little surreal.” He would like to see a more complete fossil of Mograensis before attempting to update mainstream scientific thinking about the last common ancestor of modern apes.
But al-Ashkar said the jaw and teeth are among the most useful skeletal parts for understanding the evolutionary history of great apes. “In mammalian paleontology, dental anatomy is fundamental to interpreting diet and evolutionary history,” she said.
Additionally, the idea that modern apes originated in North Africa and Arabia about 17 million years ago is somewhat consistent with known evidence, said David Alba, a paleontologist at the Miquel Crusafont Catalan Institute of Paleontology who was not involved in the analysis.
For example, today’s non-human great apes are found in Africa and Southeast Asia, and fossils show that great apes once lived in western Asia as well. Given this information and the fact that today’s lower apes are found in South and Southeast Asia, “modern humans” [apes] It must have passed through northeastern Afro-Arabia,” Alba told Live Science via email, but this does not necessarily mean it originated in Afro-Arabia.
Although the exact evolutionary significance of M. mograensis remains unclear, its discovery suggests that there are more ape fossils yet to be discovered in and around Egypt. “Further research there could significantly improve our understanding of the evolution of early apes,” Al-Ashkar said.
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