Homo sapiens’ primate ancestor may have developed in Asia, not Africa
Huh. After decades of scientific research pinpointing Africa as the so-called ‘Cradle of Life’, one scientist now points to Asia as the home of humanity’s common ancestor…which should do wonders for the demographics of this site, if you catch my drift.
If Myanmar, formerly called Burma, is confirmed as being the ancestral homeland of higher primates, or close to it, the discovery points to a circuitous migration route for some early primates, which must have gone to Africa and then come back to Asia.
Christopher Beard, lead author of the study, told Discovery News that the common ancestor to today’s humans, monkeys and apes “would have lived in Asia.”
“At some point later in time, probably only a few million years after Ganlea was alive, one or more primitive anthropoid primates, which would have been descendants of an earlier Asian ancestor, made their way from Asia to Africa,” explained Beard, a Carnegie Museum of Natural History paleontologist.
“There, they continued to evolve, and some of them eventually became modern Old World monkeys, apes and humans,” he added. “Living monkeys and apes like the orangutan that inhabit Asia returned there after evolving for millions of years in Africa.”
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