A 15 million-year-old skeleton unearthed in Kenya belongs to a previously unknown animal type that may be a relative of our oldest direct ancestor, scientists say.
The recent find predates by several millions years the long-sought "holy grail" of paleoanthropology: the last common ancestor that great apes and humans has before each of those groups diverged and developed separately.
But the new and unexpectedly copious remains are an important step in the search, apparently ruling out one leading candidate for that illustrious evolutionary position, and narrowing the range of characteristics for which fossil hunters will look.
The partial skeleton, extracted from a stone formation after a protruding tooth first signaled its presence in 1993, came from an animal approximately "the equivalent of a large modern male baboon," said co-discoverer Steve Ward of Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine and Kent State University. It weighed about 60 pounds and stood 4 to 5 feet tall with a long, flexible spine and strong grasping hands.
That creature arose during a key epoch in pre-human evolution called the Middle Miocene-about 16 million to 11 million years ago.
The fossilized partial skeleton of the animal is distinctly different from other ancient apes, prompting Ward and his colleagues to identify it as the only member of a new ape genus they call Equatorius.
Equatorius is not thought to be a direct ancestor of humans or of modern apes, said Ward. The animal probably was an evolutionary dead end, a species that disappeared after about 1½ million years, but it provides important evidence of a poorly understood era that Ward calls "the golden age of ape evolution."
Ward's team published its discovery today in the journal Science.
By Curt Suplee, Chicago SunTimes, August 27, 1999.
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