The origin of higher primates

Today, people are no longer unfamiliar with the evolution from apes to humans. Curious humans still want to know when, where and what kind of animals the apes that became humans evolved. of. This is one of the hottest research topics in paleontology today, that is, the origin of higher primates.

lemur

The primate family in which we humans belong is divided into lower primates and higher primates.

Lower primates are called apes in animal taxonomy and appeared as early as the end of the Cretaceous period more than 65 million years ago. To this day, there are still three suborders of prosimians living on the earth. They are the lemurs whose distribution is limited to Madagascar, the lean monkeys that live in the forests of Africa and South Asia, and the lemurs that are distributed in Southeast Asia. Tarsiers on some islands.

Higher primates are called the anthropoid suborder in animal taxonomy. Their living groups include the platyrrhine monkeys (also known as New World monkeys) living in the Americas and the narrow-nose monkeys distributed in Eurasia and Africa. Monkeys (also known as Old World monkeys). Among them, the narrow-nosed monkey suborder includes two superfamilies-the macaque superfamily and the anthropoid superfamily; the anthropoid superfamily includes the ape family and the hominidae.

Higher primates undoubtedly originated from lower primates. But from which lower primate species did it originate? What is the time and place of origin? That's the question for paleontologists and primatologists to solve.

Tarsier

Among these three suborders of lower primates, tarsiers and higher primates have the greatest similarity in both morphological structure and DNA sequence. Therefore, many scientists believe that higher primates are most closely related to tarsiers. Based on this, combined with some fossil evidence, many scholars speculate that tarsiers and higher primates originated from an ancient lower primate called Eotarsiform; and Eotarsiform and other lower primates The ancestors of long species had already diverged on their evolutionary paths.

However, until the 1990s, the earliest fossil evidence of higher primates discovered by scientists was some animals that lived about 35 million years ago (late Eocene) in the Fayoum area of Egypt. They share many morphological similarities with the false bear monkey (a primitive lemur) found in the Eocene of North America. Therefore, other paleontologists insist that higher primates originated from lemurs and originated in Africa. At the same time, since Australopithecus, the earliest human ancestor recognized in modern times, also originated in Africa, and the "mitochondrial Eve theory" believes that modern humans originated in Africa, the theory of the African origin of higher primates caters to a concept, That is, events involving the origin and development of our species are playing out the story of "Out of Africa" over and over again.

Obviously, on the issue of the origin of higher primates, there has been a contradiction between the biological evidence provided by living species and the paleontological evidence provided by fossil records; the two major schools of thought, the theory of the origin of tarsiers and the theory of the origin of lemurs, hold different opinions. My own opinion. The issue of the origin of higher primates, which was originally a hot research topic in science, attracted even more attention in the 1990s.

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