Newly discovered primate species could redraw the ape family tree

Most early ape fossils paleontologists have unearthed come from East Africa, close to the forests where some chimpanzees and gorillas survive today. Based on the fossil record, we know that 14 to 16 million years ago, during the middle Miocene Epoch, ancient ancestors of these apes spread from Africa into Eurasia.

Now, researchers in Egypt have found the first fossilized ape from North Africa–or at least, part of its lower jaw and some of its teeth. The fossils are estimated to be 17 to 18 million years old, predating the dispersal into Eurasia. The scientists say the newly discovered ape, named Masripithecus moghraensis, is similar to what the ancestor of all hominoids—the group that includes gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans—is predicted to have looked like.

The finding, published Thursday in Science, suggests that the ancestors of modern apes may have originated in North Africa, rather than East Africa, and then migrated into Eurasia, enriching our understanding of early ape evolution.

Among the known hominoid fossils, “we believe it’s the closest relative to the living apes and their ancestors,” says Shorouq Al-Ashqar, a paleontologist at Mansoura University and an author on the new study.

Jawbone jigsaw puzzle

In the spring of 2024, National Geographic Explorer Hesham Sallam, a paleontologist also from Mansoura University in Egypt, and his team ventured into the dry valley called Wadi Moghra in northern Egypt. Though they harbored hopes of finding an ape fossil, it seemed like quite the challenge: monkey fossils had been found in the area, but an ape? Never.

Yet one day, while Sallam was poring over a strange-looking piece of a jaw mandible, Al-Ashqar showed him another fossilized jaw fragment and quietly said, “Dr. Hesham, we found an ape.”

Hesham looked at the bone and agreed. “This looks like us,” he said, so excited he forgot about the fossilized jawbone he found.

As Al-Ashqar started reading more about ape fossils, she remembered Sallam’s forgotten fossil and asked around if anyone had taken a picture of it. Luckily, someone had, and sure enough, she discovered it was part of the same ancient ape jaw, though belonging to a different individual.

The researchers have described both parts of the jaw and a handful of teeth as belonging to a new genus they named Masripithecus, after the Arabic name ‘Masr’ for Egypt and the Greek ‘pithekos’ for monkey, and the species moghraensis, for Wadi Moghra where it was found. With their low, strongly wrinkled crowns and thick enamel, M. moghraensis's molars look perfectly adapted to cracking the hardest fruits, nuts, and seeds it could get its hands on when times were tough in the seasonal wet forests it used to live in, says Al-Ashqar.

‘Dawn of the apes’

M. moghraensis looked like “a mosaic between older East African apes and later Eurasian apes,” says Sallam.

That impression is supported by an elaborate analysis he and his colleagues conducted comparing numerous ape fossils, as well as measurements and genetic data from apes alive today, which shows M. moghraensis may look quite close to what the ancestor of all living apes—estimated to have lived a few million years earlier—likely looked like.

This means the group may well have originated in northeastern Africa and then spread into Europe and Asia, redrawing the most likely map of how modern apes rose to prominence.

Those days were “the dawn of the apes,” says Sallam. As soon as sea levels dropped and a land bridge emerged, apes began spreading across Eurasia, giving rise to a variety of species along the way.

“It is well known that the fossil record of hominoids in Africa is geographically very biased,” says paleontologist David Alba, a paleontologist from the University of Barcelona who was not involved in the study but wrote an accompanying commentary. “It is also known that they were present in Saudi Arabia sometime later, so finding them in northern Africa by this time is important, but not totally unexpected.”

He says he’s more surprised by the analysis suggesting that M. moghraensis is more closely related to modern apes than are similarly aged fossils of extinct apes from East Africa. But he adds that reliably reconstructing the relationships among Miocene apes has so far proven “very difficult,” and many uncertainties remain.

Ellen Miller, a paleoanthropologist at Wake Forest University and a National Geographic Explorer who has worked in Wadi Moghra but was not involved in the current study, says many of the fossils at Moghra are broken, so the recovery of such a well-preserved fossil is surprising and very welcome.

“Almost everything we know from early Miocene apes comes from sites in East Africa, and then there are lots of apes known from middle Miocene sites in Eurasia,” she says. “So the recovery of Masripithecus makes it tempting to draw arrows on maps.”

A route for ape expansion through Egypt may be supported with future work, she adds, “but a new find such as this is always the beginning of the work, not the end.”

Sallam agrees. “I’m sure there are many more fossils to be found in this area and beyond,” he says. “We have opened a big window for everybody to start thinking outside of East Africa.”