Ancient ape found in orangutan's homeland

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http://www.nature.com/nsu/030303/030303-6.html

 

Ancient ape found in orangutan's homeland

Ten-million-year-old fossil teeth turn up in Thailand.

 

6 March 2003

JOHN WHITFIELD

 

An ancient relative of the orangutan has been

discovered in Thailand. The species is the first

fossil ape unearthed in the area where orangutans live

today.

 

Only teeth have been found so far. These bear an

" amazing resemblance " to orangutan teeth, says the

fossil's discoverer, Jean-Jacques Jaeger of the

University of Montpellier, France. " It's more similar

[to orangutans] than any other fossil ape, " he

enthuses.

 

Like the orangutan, the newly discovered species,

named Lufengpithecus chiangmuanensis by Jaeger and his

colleagues1, probably weighed about 70 kilograms. It

lived in the tropical forests of northern Thailand

between 10 and 13.5 million years ago.

 

The finding opens a window onto new times and places

in the apes' paltry fossil record, says

palaeontologist Peter Andrews of the Natural History

Museum in London. " This is just the beginning, " he

says. " There will be lots of species all over

Southeast Asia. "

 

But Lufengpithecus is almost certainly not an ancestor

of the orangutan. It joins a group of fossil apes that

ranged from Europe to China around 10 million years

ago. Researchers have little idea about how they were

related to one another.

 

Most of the orangutan's extinct relatives are known

only from skulls and teeth. The exception -

Sivapithecus, which lived in modern-day Pakistan - had

a face like an orangutan, but few other similarities.

Its skeleton shows it to have walked on all fours,

like a baboon.

 

No known fossil ape is adapted for life in the trees,

says Jaeger. Orangutans may therefore be descended

from a ground-dweller, or it may be that no known

fossil is an ancestor of a living ape.

 

Comparing teeth is not always a good guide to animal

relationships, warns oral biologist Jay Kelley of the

University of Illinois in Chicago. " Animals that are

very similar dentally have turned out to be very

different. "

 

Kelley has found two other species of Lufengpithecus,

with intact skulls, in southern China. " There's a lot

about those skulls that doesn't look at all like an

orangutan, " he says. Both are several million years

younger than the Thai species.

 

The orangutan is the only great ape with a known

fossil record. Mysteriously, no African fossil has

been found that might be related to chimps and

gorillas. " The apes seem to have sprung out of

nowhere, " says Andrews.

 

References

1.Chaimanee, Y. et al. A Middle Miocene hominoid from

Thailand and orangutan origins. Nature, 422, 61 - 65,

(2003). |Article|

 

© Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

 

 

 

 

 

 

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