Long before the burly bonobo or the even brawny Gorilla gorilla , there live a very strange imitator . So strange , in fact , it weighed the same as a newborn man .
While rootle around the dusty deposit of the Tugen Hills in Kenya , anthropologists from Yale University and Stony Brook University managed to pluck out a tiny fossilized tooth , just a few millimeters in diam ( image below ) . Now , 14 years after this discovery in 2004 , they have just published their research on the tooth , discover a freshly identify nonextant coinage of copycat – Simiolus minutus – which weighed under 3.5 kilograms ( 7.7 Irish punt ) .
Today , the family tree of apes let in the cracking apes – us , Gorilla gorilla , bonobo , orangutans , and chimps – and the less apes – Edward Gibbon . However , they were once a rich and various branch of order Primates . As reported in the December issuing of theJournal of Human Evolution , it ’s think that the miniature ape lived around 12.5 million geezerhood ago inthe Miocene epoch , a hugely crucial time in the world of primate .
Around the start of this era , just under25 million yearsago , ape evolved and quickly became an extremely diverse group . However , within the last 10 million old age , ape were faced with a dramatic gash in metal money diversity . As you’re able to see today , there ’s only a smattering of emulator species around . Why ? Well , the researchers are hope that this bizarre slight ape could help to explain .
As a major clue , its teeny tooth shows evidence of leaf - eating , which scientist call folivory . Unfortunately forS.minutus , the earliest colobine monkeys were also fine - tune this adaptation at the meter , put them in verbatim competition with each other . By the looks of how thing turned out , the monkey follow out on top .
“ One matter this shows us is that some apes were leaning toward folivory at just the meter when imp were evolving their unambiguously effective adjustment for it , ” Professor James Rossie , of Stony Brook University ’s Department of Anthropology , said in astatement .
“ Under those circumstance , I ’m not surprised that this is the last you see of these small apes . We ’ve previously found theearliest colobine monkeysat these sites , and now we have an ape that look like it would have been in lineal competition with them for food . ”
In other words,“They brought a knife to a gunfight and then found out the tongue was a plastic picnic tongue , ” Rossie toldThe New York Times .
On the other end of the weighing machine , the largest ape that ever livedwasGigantopithecus , perhaps standing as marvelous as 3 meters ( 9.8 feet ) . Since it only went extinct around 100,000 years ago , it ’s potential that it co - existed with humans .
