Fossil skull sheds light on ape ancestry

A remarkably complete fossil skull discovered in Kenya reveals what the common ancestor of all living apes and humans may have looked like, according to a new study involving UCL research. The find, announced today in Nature , belongs to an infant that lived about 13 million years ago. It's a significant discovery that will help researchers uncover whether the common ancestor of living apes and humans originated in Africa and what these early ancestors looked like. The study involved a large international team including Professor Fred Spoor at UCL and was led by Professor Isaiah Nengo of the Turkana Basin Institute, Stony Brook University and De Anza College, USA. Among living primates, humans are most closely related to the apes, including chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and gibbons, but little is known about their last common ancestor. "We've got many spectacular fossil finds showing how humans evolved in Africa over the last six to seven million years, since our lineage split from that of the chimpanzees. However, the evolution of the common ancestors of living apes and humans before 10 million years ago remains elusive," said study co-author Professor Spoor, UCL Cell & Developmental Biology and the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology.