A newly discovered fossil ape from northern Egypt is reshaping the understanding of early hominoid evolution, say researchers. The fossil finding suggests that the closest ancestors to modern apes may have emerged in northern Africa, outside the traditionally studied regions of East Africa. “[The] findings […] confirm that paleontologists might have been looking for crown-hominoid ancestors in the wrong place,” write David Alba and Júlia Arias-Martorell in a related Perspective. Dating to about 17-18 million years ago, the new species – Masripithecus – represents the closest known hominoid relation to the lineage that ultimately gave rise to all living apes, including humans. Today, it is widely accepted that the earliest apes (stem hominoids) originated in Afro-Arabia during the Oligocene Epoch, more than 25 million years ago, and diversified there before spreading into Eurasia by roughly 14 to 16 million years ago, during the Miocene. However, the emergence of modern apes – the group that includes all living species and their last common ancestor – remains uncertain, as fossils from this period are scarce, widely dispersed, and difficult to interpret. This uncertainty is compounded by the uneven fossil record in Africa, where discoveries have been concentrated in only a few regions, leaving much of the potential ancient range of Miocene-age apes unexplored.

Here, Shorouq Al-Ashqar and colleagues describe a newly identified fossil ape discovered in the Wadi Moghra region in northern Egypt, which lived ~17-18 million years ago. According to the authors, this new species, named Masripithecus moghraensis, adds to our understanding of early ape diversity and evolution at a pivotal moment when Afro-Arabia was becoming connected to Eurasia, enabling the spread of species out of Africa. To determine where this species fits into the evolutionary tree of humans, Al-Ashqar et al. employed a modern Bayesian “tip-dating” approach, which incorporates both anatomical traits and fossil ages to estimate relationships and divergence times. Their analysis suggests that Masripithecus represents the stem hominoid that is most closely related to the lineage that ultimately gave rise to all living apes. The authors argue that the findings support the notion that modern apes may have originated in northern Afro-Arabia, the Levant, or the eastern Mediterranean.