15-Million-Year-Old Monkey Fossil May Resemble Ape-Human Ancestor

Researchers have found a skull from a 15-million-year-old monkey that suggests that a still-undiscovered ancestor of both apes and people looked more like an orangutan than many scientists now believe. That undiscovered ancestor stood at a crucial split in the evolutionary family tree. One branch went on to produce apes and people; the other branch led to Old World monkeys, which live in Africa and Asia today.

Found in 1994 on Maboko Island, Kenya, the fossil is the oldest known skull from an Old World monkey. It came from a creature called Victoriapithecus, a fruit-munching, 11-pound monkey that walked on the ground and climbed trees. It is closer than any other known monkey to the split with the ape-human branch, so it probably resembles the elusive ancestor of monkeys and humans that occupied the split, Brenda Benefit of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale reports in today’s Nature.