Into Africa? Fossils Suggest Earliest Anthropoids Colonized Africa

ScienceDaily for October 28, 2010 reported on fossil evidence for anthropoids colonizing Africa.

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. According to the paper published in the journal Nature, what is exceptional about these new fossils -- discovered at the Dur At-Talah escarpment in central Libya -- is the diversity of species present: the site includes three distinct families of anthropoid primates that lived in North Africa at approximately the same time.