Our ancestors did not originate in Africa

The earliest ancestors of modern human may have originated in Asia and not Africa as widely believed, according to a new study based on fossil discovery in Myanmar.

Previous fossil finds have long suggested that Africa was the cradle for anthropoids, which include monkeys, apes and humans. Now, an international team in Myanmar has found the tooth of a pre-human ancestor which may prove that anthropoids originated in Asia.

The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could shed light on a pivotal step in primate and human evolution, the researchers said.

The four teeth of the prehistoric human — called Afrasia djijidae as it forms a missing link between Africa and Asia — were recovered after six years of hard work.

They date back to 37 million years and resemble those of another anthropoid, the 38-million-year-old Afrotarsius libycus, recently found in the Sahara Desert of Libya, LiveScience reported.

The anthropoids in Libya were far more diverse at that early time in Africa than scientists had thought, suggesting they actually originated elsewhere. And the close similarity between Afrasia and Afrotarsius now suggests that early anthropoids colonised Africa from Asia, the team said.

This migration from Asia ultimately helps set the stage for the later evolution of apes and humans in Africa. “Africa is the place of origin of man, and Asia is the place of origins of our far ancestors,” researcher Jean-Jacques Jaeger, a paleontologist at University of Poitiers in France, said.

The shape of the Asian Afrasia and the North African Afrotarsius fossils suggest these animals probably ate insects. The size of their teeth hints that in life these animals weighed around 100 grams, roughly the size of a modern tarsier, the team said.