20 million-year-old well preserved fossil skull: Ugandapithecus major

Map of Uganda showing the remote Karamoja region in the northeast of the country where a team of Ugandan and French paleontologists announced Tuesday they had found a 20-million-year-old ape skull, saying it could shed light on the region's evolutionary history. Illustration from PhysOrg.

A well preserved fossil skull of an ancient primate, Ugandapithecus major, has been excavated in the northeast region of Karamoja in Uganda (hence the genus name, Uganda monkey). The 20 million-year-old skull belongs to a male and probably died when it was about 10 years old, said researchers Pickford and Senut. The cranial size of Ugandapithecus major was about the same size as that of chimpanzees but its brain size is smaller. Ugandapithecus major is a tree-climbing catarrhine, an herbivore that lives around the Miocene. Although its genus name refers to it as a monkey, Ugandapithecus major is actually a hominoid (ape).

A well preserved skull of Ugandapithecus major. Photo from BBC News. 

The skull will be cleaned and prepared in France for about a year before returning it back to Uganda. Ugandapithecus major was described in 2000 by Senut et al. from a few dental and postcranial remains.

You can read Senut et al. (2000) A new genus of Early Miocene hominoid from East Africa: Ugandapithecus major (Le Gros Clark & Leakey, 1950) here (requires subscription).

Locating Land of Punt Using Mummified Baboons

Land of Punt, sometimes referred to as Ta-netjer (God's land) by ancient Egyptians was a place where pharaohs organized trading expeditions to. For the ancient Egyptians, Land of Punt is the land of fragrances, giraffes and electrum, among many other exotic items.  Live baboons were among many items brought back from Land of Punt to Egypt. Researchers now think that they know where Land of Punt is, thanks to the mummified baboons found in Thebes and Valley of the Kings.

Mummified baboon, like the one above, was used by researchers to locate the Land of Punt. 

Using the hair of the mummified baboons from both location, researchers ran an oxygen isotope analysis to estimate where these baboons were from (therefore revealing the location of Land of Punt). By comparing the values of oxygen isotope of the mummified baboons to present day baboon populations, all specimens from Eritrea and some from Ethiopia are deemed good matches by the researchers. Thus, Land of Punt is believed to be in Eritrea and the eastern parts of Ethiopia. Yemen, Somalia and Mozambique have been suggested as possible locations but readings of baboons from these locations do not match those of the mummified ones. (Although no baboon samples from Yemen were used, researchers are confident enough to posit that baboons from Yemen would "look an awful lot like a baboon from Somalia isotopically").

Aside from the fact that the researchers failed to obtain baboon samples from Yemen, it's crucial to point out that researchers were able to only identify the origin of the baboon in Valley of the Kings (meaning that the isotope reading from this one sole baboon was used to match up with all the present day baboon isotope reading). The mummified baboon from Thebes have spent some time living as a pet so its oxygen isotope had changed due to ingestion of local diet.

Read more about this discovery on Heritage Key: Baboon Mummy Tests Reveal Ethiopia and Eritrea as Ancient Egyptians' 'Land of Punt'.

Oldest Anthropoid Fossil Hails From Thailand, Said Thai Officials

So supposedly a newly publicized paper back in November 2009 confirms that the oldest primate anthropoid fossil comes from the southern province of Krabi, Thailand (according to some Thai news articles, which unfortunately I cannot find where they cited their primary sources). It was discovered 14 years ago by Thailand's Mineral Resources Department archaeologists. Siamopithecus eocaenus supposedly roamed the earth 35 million years ago and is in fact currently the oldest primate anthropoid fossil from the fossil record (again, can't find where they cited the primary source). Thanks to Mae Kai Fa for pointing out that it is the oldest "anthropoid" fossil not primate fossil, which makes more sense.

Siamopithecus eocaenus or the Siam Ape gets its name from the country it was found. Siam was the official name of Thailand until 1939, although it is still somewhat used synonymously with Thailand.

Fragments of the fossil includes the lower right molars and upper left and right molars that are attached to the eye bone. Researchers think that S. eocaenus is about the size of a gibbon, weighs around 7kg and belongs to the Amphipithecidae family.

So, I don't know. This sounds a bit like the Darwinius massilae fiasco all over again. I also wonder why no one picked up this news, except a sprinkle of Thai news websites. What do you think? The paper pointed out by these articles is possibly The Face of Siamopithecus: New Geometric-Morphometric Evidence for Its Anthropoid Status by Zollikoffer et al. (2009) that was published in The Anatomical Record on November. Unfortunately I do not have access to that journal so I can't verify whether the paper did point out that S. eocaenus is indeed 35 million years ago.

Some Thai news article:
Oldest primate fossils found by Bangkok Post.
35-mn-year-old fossil raises questions on primates' origin by Prokerala.com.
Oldest primate fossils found in Krabi by National News Bureau of Thailand (NNT).

Algeripithecus and Azibius: Anthropoids or Strepsirhines?

The mandible of Algeripithecus. Photo from Science Daily.

The debate for the origin of anthropoid points to two locations. One hypothesis supports the notion that anthropoids originated from Africa while the other argues that anthropoids originated from Asia. The model for the African origin hypothesis rests on Algeripithecus minutus, a fossil discovered in Algeria, Africa that lived 45 million years old. Algeripithecus and Azibius are Eocene primates that lived around the same time in Africa some 50 million years ago.

Much more complete craniodental fossils of Algeripithecus and Azibius were recently excavated and reveal that they might not be anthropoids but were strepsirhines instead. New data from the fossils, according to a recently published paper by Tabuce et al. (2009), suggest that Algeripithecus and Azibius were the earliest primates to branch out of the Afro-Arabian strepsirhines clade.

According to Tabuce et al. (2009), there are anatomical evidence suggesting that Azibius were nocturnal. They also found that Algeripithecus has a long, thin and forwardly inclined lower canine alveolus, features that match the long and and flat lower canine in the tooth comb (dental comb) of crown strepsirhines. These physical characteristics suggest that both Algeripithecus and Azibius are closely related to crown strepsirhines. The researchers concluded that both Algeripithecus and Azibius were not members of the anthropoid family but instead an early representative of the crown strepsirhines. Crown strepsirhines gave rise to modern day lemurs, galagos and lorises.

Tooth comb of a ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta). Notice the two lower canines that are long, thin and forwardly inclined. Together with four lower incisors, it makes up the tooth comb. Photo from Wikipedia.

These recently excavated fossils support the origin of crown strepsirhines from Africa. However, it also challenges the hypothesis that points to Africa as the origin of anthropoids since Algeripithecus should be classified as strepsirhines instead of anthropoids (and no longer provide evidence for the Africa origin hypothesis) according to this published paper by Tabuce et al.


References:

CNRS (Délégation Paris Michel-Ange) (2009, September 15). African Origin Of Anthropoid Primates Called Into Question With New Fossil Discovery. ScienceDaily. Retrieved September 15, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2009/09/090915101355.htm

Rodolphe Tabuce, Laurent Marivaux, Renaud Lebrun, Mohammed Adaci, Mustapha Bensalah, Pierre-Henri Fabre, Emmanuel Fara, Helder Gomes Rodrigues, Lionel Hautier, Jean-Jacques Jaeger, Vincent Lazzari, Fateh Mebrouk, Stéphane Peigné, Jean Sudre, Paul Tafforeau, Xavier Valentin, and Mahammed Mahboubi. Anthropoid versus strepsirhine status of the African Eocene primates Algeripithecus and Azibius: craniodental evidence. Proc R Soc B 2009 : rspb.2009.1339v1-rspb20091339.

Homo floresiensis Walked Out of Africa

Skull of LB1 (Homo floresiensis, or the hobbit). Photo from Science Museum

New analysis by a team led by Australian National University doctoral student Debbie Argue showed that Homo floresiensis, nicknamed hobbits, were early hominin and walked out of Africa to Flores. Their findings supports the argument that Homo floresiensis had a unique wrist anatomy that originated from a lineage that lived long before the common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.

With Mike Moorwood from University of Wollongong and Thomas Sutikna from Indonesian Center for Archaeology, Debbie Argue compared 60 skulls and skeletal features from two individual hobbits to those of hominins, chimpanzees and gorillas using cladistic analysis. The result shows that Homo floresiensis "probably took one of two evolutionary paths from Africa to Flores. One began 1.66 million years ago, the other 1.9 million years ago".

Read more here: Hobbits Walked Out of Africa

New Branch of Archaeology: Paleoanthropology Meets Primatology

A chimpanzee mother using rocks (hammer and anvil) to break open nuts, an example of tool use in primates.
Photo from Duke University.

A new branch of archaeology is being introduced by international scientists. Led by University of Calgary archaeologist Julio Mercader and 17 other co-authors of the paper "Primate archaeology", advocate a new "Paleoanthropology meets Primatology" inter-disciplinary field that seek to examine primate tool use in a long term, evolutionary context.

Read more about the article from redOrbit: International Scientists Establish New Branch Of Archaeology.