40 Million Year Old Primate Fossils Found In Asia 91
sosaited writes "It has been widely believed that our ancestors originated out of Africa, but a paper published in Nature by Carnegie Museum of Natural History scientists puts this in doubt. The paper is based on the fossils of four primate species found in Asia which are 40 million years old, during which period Africa was thought to not have these species. The diversity and timing of the new anthropoids raises two scenarios. Anthropoids might simply have emerged in Africa much earlier than thought, and gone undiscovered by modern paleontologists. Or they could have crossed over from Asia, where evidence suggests that anthropoids lived 55 million years ago, flourishing and diversifying in the wide-open ecological niches of an anthropoid-free Africa."
Paleogeology (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed... this article is better (thanks for pointing that out).
What I haven't found in the article though is how monkeys are supposed to cross over from Asia to Africa...
Here is a map of how the continents were connected about 50 million years ago [wikipedia.org]. It seems to me that it would have been a long swim.
It would be nice to see the two fields of study (paleogeology [wikipedia.org] and paleontology [wikipedia.org] to combine their efforts.
Re:we weren't the first (Score:3, Interesting)
If mankind were to vanish today and some other species were to achieve our technological advancement in fifty million years, what evidence would remain for them to find?
LM descent stages on the moon. Satellites in geosynchronous orbit. The lunar hardware should be recognizably artificial even after a billion years. GEO is stable because of minima in the earth's gravitational field. Satellites will slide along the orbit and collect (some of them) over Sri Lanka (Arthur Clarke loved that bit). Once in that stable location only impacts will move them out.
Practically everything on Earth will be gone. maybe a few durable metal components will survive. I once visited an old graveyard in Ireland. Gravestones more than 300 years old had eroded to unreadability.
Re:we weren't the first (Score:3, Interesting)
Not very likely. Pottery for example has been produced by pretty much every known civilization and lasts "forever". The same would go for gold objects.
Did you find any shards or jewelery that don't fit to any known human civilization?