Modern apes may have swung into existence in North Africa or the Middle East.
New fossil findings — published March 26 in Science — unveil Masripithecus, a roughly 17-million-year-old early ape that lived in what is now Egypt. The discovery expands the earliest ancestry of primates like gibbons, chimpanzees and humans beyond East Africa.
That’s where the vast majority of the fossil evidence for early apes came from until now, says paleontologist Shorouq Al-Ashqar at Mansoura University in Egypt.
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