Fossils discovered in Egypt may be the closest ancestor of all great apes

A newly discovered species of monkey that lived about 17 million years ago suggests that the first great apes may have evolved in North Africa, not East Africa as previously thought.

In 2023 and 2024 at the archaeological site of Wadi Moghra in northern Egypt, Shorouq Al-Ashqar at Mansour University in Egypt and her colleagues found the teeth and jawbones of two ancient great apes in deposits approximately 17 million to 18 million years old.

Altogether, the team found four specimens, including the front part of the mandible, or jaw, along with two molars found next to it, belonging to a single individual. The second fossil is a separate lower jaw fragment, without tooth crowns, from another individual.

Al-Ashqar and her colleagues think the animal is named Masripithecus moghraensisis the closest known ancestor of all living apes, including humans, gorillas and chimpanzees, and lesser apes such as gibbons and siamangs. Apes are different from apes because they don’t have a tail.

The first great apes are thought to have all evolved in Africa, but by 16 million years ago some members of the group were living in Europe and Asia.

To the researchers’ surprise, the fossils were found in North Africa rather than in the east of the continent, where the major leaps in ape development were previously thought to have taken place.

Al-Ashqar says that the combination of ape-like features in the lower jaw, particularly where the two halves of the lower jaw join, called the symphysis, show similarities in structure to later apes.

“The molars are also very expressive – they are low, rounded and strongly ridged.” [ridged]“Also, the second and third molars are almost the same size.

M. moghraensis It is thought to have weighed about 25 kilograms, larger than apes of the time, and phylogenetic analysis showed it clearly fell into the hominoid lineage, Al-Ashqar says.

Teeth and jaw indicate M. moghraensis she had a flexible diet, she says. “It probably depended mainly on fruit, but it could handle harder foods like nuts and seeds, especially with that robust jaw and complex molars.”

However, until limb bones are found, it is impossible to say how it moved or whether it lived primarily in trees or on the ground.

The size of the specimens’ canines indicates that both individuals were male, he says Erik Seiffertat the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, who was also part of the team. But they would be about as big as a small female chimpanzee.

“For decades, paleontologists were somewhat stuck looking for the same species in the early Miocene of East Africa. Now we know that it was a different story in North Africa,” says Seiffert.

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