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A new discovery described by a team of international scientists, including Carnegie Museum of Natural History paleontologist Christopher Beard, suggests that anthropoids -- the primate group that includes humans, apes, and monkeys -- "colonized" Africa, rather than originally evolving in Africa as has been widely accepted.
... the paleontologists suggest, it is more likely that several anthropoid species "colonized" Africa from another continent 39 million years ago -- the middle of the Eocene epoch. Since diversification would have occurred over extreme lengths of time, and likely leave fossil evidence, the new fossils combined with previous sampling in North Africa leads the paper's authors to surmise an Asian origin for anthropoids ...
More interestingly and controversially, this analysis further suggests that the lineage leading to the living hominoids dispersed out of Africa about twenty million years ago, and that the common ancestor of the living African apes, including humans, migrated back into Africa from Eurasia within about the past ten million years.
Our special relationship to chimpanzees and gorillas has been known only for a few decades. Before that, most anthropologists thought we were the sister group to all the apes, and therefore equally close to African and Asian apes. The consensus favoured Asia as the home of our late Miocene ancestors, and some authorities even picked out a particular fossil 'ancestor'...