The fossilized remains of the Miocene-period ape species Anadoluvius turkae have been unearthed at the paleotological site of Çorakyerler in central Anatolia, Türkiye.
Graecopithecus freybergi lived 7.2 million years ago in the dust-laden savannah of the Athens Basin. Image credit: Velizar Simeonovski.
The origin of the hominines (African apes and humans) is among the most hotly debated topics in paleoanthropology.
The traditional view, ever since Charles Darwin, holds that hominines and hominins (humans and fossil relatives) originate in Africa, where the earliest hominins are found and where all living non-human hominines live.
More recently a European origin has been proposed, based on the analysis of Late Miocene apes from Europe and Central Anatolia.
Anadoluvius turkae attests to a lengthy history of hominines in Europe, with multiple species in the eastern Mediterranean known for at least 2.3 million years.
“Our findings further suggest that hominines not only evolved in western and central Europe but spent over 5 million years evolving there and spreading to the eastern Mediterranean before eventually dispersing into Africa, probably as a consequence of changing environments and diminishing forests,” said Professor David Begun, a paleontologist at the University of Toronto.
“The members of this radiation to which Anadoluvius turkae belongs are currently only identified in Europe and Anatolia.”
The partial skull of female Anadoluvius turkae. Image credit: Sevim-Erol et al., doi: 10.1038/s42003-023-05210-5.
The well-preserved partial skull of Anadoluvius turkae — which includes most of the facial structure and the front part of the brain case — was uncovered at the site of Çorakyerler in central Anatolia in 2015.
“The completeness of the fossil allowed us to do a broader and more detailed analysis using many characters and attributes that are coded into a program designed to calculate evolutionary relationships,” Professor Begun said.
“The face is mostly complete, after applying mirror imaging. The new part is the forehead, with bone preserved to about the crown of the cranium. Previously described fossils do not have this much of the brain case.”
Anadoluvius turkae was about the size of a large male chimpanzee (50-60 kg), lived in a dry forest setting, and probably spent a great deal of time on the ground.
“We have no limb bones but judging from its jaws and teeth, the animals found alongside it, and the geological indicators of the environment, Anadoluvius turkae probably lived in relatively open conditions, unlike the forest settings of living great apes,” said Dr. Ayla Sevim-Erol, a researcher at Ankara University.
“More like what we think the environments of early humans in Africa were like. The powerful jaws and large, thickly enameled teeth suggest a diet including hard or tough food items from terrestrial sources such as roots and rhizomes.”
The animals that lived alongside Anadoluvius turkae are those commonly associated with African grasslands and dry forests today, such as giraffes, wart hogs, rhinos, diverse antelopes, zebras, elephants, porcupines, hyenas and lion-like carnivores.
The research shows that the ecological community appears to have dispersed into Africa from the eastern Mediterranean sometime after about 8 million years ago.
“The founding of the modern African open country fauna from the eastern Mediterranean has long been known and now we can add to the list of entrants the ancestors of the African apes and humans,” Dr. Sevim-Erol said.
The findings establish Anadoluvius turkae as a branch of the part of the evolutionary tree that gave rise to chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and humans.
Although African apes today are only known from Africa, as are the earliest known humans, the authors conclude that the ancestors of both came from Europe and the eastern Mediterranean.
Anadoluvius turkae and other fossil apes from nearby Greece (Ouranopithecus) and Bulgaria (Graecopithecus) form a group that come closest in many details of anatomy and ecology to the earliest known hominins, or humans.
The new fossils are the best-preserved specimens of this group of early hominines and provide the strongest evidence to date that the group originated in Europe and later dispersed into Africa.
The team’s analysis also suggests that the Balkan and Anatolian apes evolved from ancestors in western and central Europe.
With its more comprehensive data, the research provides evidence that these other apes were also hominines and means that it is more likely that the whole group evolved and diversified in Europe, rather than the alternative scenario in which separate branches of apes earlier moved independently into Europe from Africa over the course of several million years, and then went extinct without issue.
“There is no evidence of the latter, though it remains a favorite proposal among those who do not accept a European origin hypothesis,” Professor Begun said.
“These findings contrast with the long-held view that African apes and humans evolved exclusively in Africa.”
“While the remains of early hominines are abundant in Europe and Anatolia, they are completely absent from Africa until the first hominin appeared there about 7 million years ago.”
“This new evidence supports the hypothesis that hominines originated in Europe and dispersed into Africa along with many other mammals between 9 and 7 million years ago, though it does not definitively prove it.”
“For that, we need to find more fossils from Europe and Africa between 8 and 7 million years old to establish a definitive connection between the two groups.”
The findings were publsihed in the journal Communications Biology.
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A. Sevim-Erol et al. 2023. A new ape from Türkiye and the radiation of late Miocene hominines. Commun Biol 6, 842; doi: 10.1038/s42003-023-05210-5
