The ancestor of all modern African monkeys was alive 3 million years earlier than previously thought and coexisted with members of a now-extinct branch of the monkey family tree, according to new evidence from anthropologists.
“We pushed back the origin of modern monkeys by a huge chunk of time,” said anthropologist Andrew Hill of Yale University, the senior researcher on the project. “This means there are all sorts of things we can think about. You can start to look at animal interactions that might have taken place.”
Hill and colleagues reported their work online March 18 in the journal PNAS.
Read more: https://news.yale.edu/2013/03/19/tooth-pushes-back-modern-monkeys-first-ancestor-three-million-years