Chilling 66-million-year-old discovery rewrites primate origin story
A groundbreaking study has traced the 66-million-year evolutionary history of primates and overturned conventional thought that our ancestors originally inhabited warm tropical forests. Using advanced statistical and climate-modeling techniques, researchers have discovered that the earliest members of our evolutionary family tree were in fact cold-climate survivors.
Researchers from the University of Reading investigated 479 species of primates –178 extinct, via fossils, and 301 living – to track how species richness, climate tolerance and geographic range changed over time and across the long-established and studied evolutionary branches. The species spanned North America, Europe and Asia.
To challenge the accepted “warm tropical forest" hypothesis of primate origin, the researchers needed to reconstruct both the evolutionary relationships between species and the geographic locations and climate conditions of their ancestors. This was no mean feat, as it required a timeline of around 66 million years.
The team fused together genomic and fossil data across hundreds of primate species and, referencing an existing "supertree" of primate relationships involving extinct and extant (living) species, the researchers paired this complex map with detailed climate and geographic locations to pull apart trait evolution in relationship to these external factors.
