Just a Nasty Little Thing

Still, the monkey-like creature was our ancestor

They were hardly prepossessing. Their small heads, sinewy limbs and long tails gave them the look of a lowly monkey. Largely tree dwellers, they scampered from branch to branch on all fours. Though they were not very formidable--males weighed no more than 5 1/2 kg (12 lbs.), females about 80% of that--they could take on a ferocious appearance. Whenever the males competed with one another for females or were threatened, they would bare their fanglike canines. Comments Duke University Paleontologist Elwyn Simons: "A nasty little thing."

Yet the beastly little primates were much more than that. They were probably the smartest, most advanced creatures of their day. Aegyptopithecus zeuxis (connecting ape of Egypt), which lived some 30 million years ago in what was then a lushly forested region in Egypt, has long been suspected of occupying a key position in the genealogy of higher primates, including man. Three years ago, Simons and his colleagues resumed their digging about 60 km (40 miles) southwest of Cairo, where he had found a single fossilized Aegyptopithecus skull in 1966. Last week they reported striking new evidence that the scrawny creature is the oldest common ancestor of apes and man.

Support for this bold assertion comes from careful study of more than two dozen skeletal remnants recently dug up by Simons' team. These fossils helped the scientists re-create not only the physical structure of the animal, its movements and diet but its social behavior as well. Of special importance were the primate's teeth. "The males had large, fanglike canine teeth," explains Duke Anatomist

Richard Kay, "whereas females had comparatively small canines." Why? Apparently the males developed their large fangs so they could battle one another for mates, establish a social pecking order and, when threatened by an outside aggressor, defend their troop--a characteristic of many modern monkeys and apes.

Judging from examination of its eye sockets, Aegyptopithecus, unlike some of its rivals, was a diurnal creature, one that was active mostly in daylight. This implies that Aegyptopithecus lived in groups, rather than by itself as do many nocturnal animals. It also means that there was probably extensive visual and vocal communication between the member animals. Such socialization would have put stresses on them, requiring them to be more assertive, courageous and competitive than if they had lived by themselves--which in turn could have fostered brain growth. Indeed, says Kay, Aegyptopithecus' cranial capacity of about 30 cc (1.8 cu. in.) was larger, relative to its body size, than that of any of its mammalian contemporaries.

When Simons began unearthing scattered Aegyptopithecus fragments in the 1960s, he could only speculate about the primate's place in the evolutionary past. From the latest group of fossils, he is convinced that it was the immediate forebear of Dryopithecus, a more advanced primate that first appeared in Africa 8 million years later; that was not long before the crucial split in the evolutionary tree that produced one branch leading to the apes, another to man. Simons is so sure of Aegyptopithecus' place in the evolutionary scheme that he has taken to calling the beast "the dawn ape."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.