“We never had information on that before - it was always a mystery.” “Alesi came from exactly the right time and place to show us what the ancestors of all the modern apes and humans might have looked like,” study co-author Ellen Miller, a primatologist and paleoanthropologist at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, told Live Science. This is the first ape cranium unearthed from between 10 million and 14 million years ago, and the most complete one discovered from between 7 million and 17 million years ago. It also provided us with the critical volcanic minerals by which we were able to date the fossil.” “A nearby volcano buried the forest where the baby ape lived, preserving the fossil and countless trees. “The Napudet locality offers us a rare glimpse of an African landscape 13 million years ago,” study co-author Craig Feibel, chair of the anthropology department at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said in a statement. He suggested its nickname, “Alesi,” because “ales” means “ancestor” in the local Turkana language. Kenyan fossil hunter John Ekusi discovered the skull in 2014 in the Napudet area, west of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. “So, as you can imagine, there are numerous possibilities for how that distribution came to be, and different researchers have suggested different hypotheses for where the common ancestor of the living apes and humans might be found.” Great timing “The living apes are found all across Africa and Asia - chimps and gorillas in Africa, orangutans and gibbons in Asia - and there are many fossil apes found on both continents, and Europe as well,” study co-author Christopher Gilbert, a paleoanthropologist at Hunter College in New York, told Live Science. As such, researchers were not sure what the last common ancestors of living apes and humans might have looked like, and even whether they originated in Africa or Eurasia. Fossil evidence from this part of the primate family tree is scarce, and consists mostly of isolated teeth and broken jaw fragments. Much remains unknown about the common ancestors of living apes and humans from the critical time when these branches diverged. (The last common ancestor that humans had with chimpanzees lived about 6 million to 7 million years ago.) These so-called hominoids - that is, the gibbons, great apes and humans - emerged and diversified during the Miocene epoch, approximately 23 million to 5 million years ago. It likely belonged to a fruit-eating, slow-climbing primate that resembled a baby gibbon, the researchers said.Īmong the living primates, humans are most closely related to the apes, which include the lesser apes (gibbons) and the great apes ( chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans).

The 13-million-year-old infant skull, which its discoverers nicknamed “Alesi,” was unearthed in Kenya in 2014. The most complete extinct-ape skull ever found reveals what the last common ancestor of all living apes and humans might have looked like, according to a new study.

Skull sketch