The small snout of the skull would have made Alesi look like a baby gibbon. The researchers also noted that Alesi's 6.16-cubic-inch (101 cubic centimeters) brain was about as big as that of a modern lemur of the same size. However, the size of the skull and teeth do suggest that if Alesi had reached adulthood, it would have weighed about 24.9 lbs. The researchers cannot tell if Alesi was male or female, as the infant was too young for the features of the skull that distinguish the sexes to have emerged, the researchers said. "It helps us understand and reconstruct how and why a certain lineage might have evolved," Gilbert said. "What the discovery of Alesi shows is that this group was close to the origin of living apes and humans, and that this origin was African."ĭetermining that the last common ancestors of living apes and humans originated in Africa is important because it helps scientists better understand how ancient climate, ecology, geography and other factors were key to their evolution. " Nyanzapithecus alesi was part of a group of primates that existed in Africa for over 10 million years," lead study author Isaiah Nengo, of Stony Brook University in New York, said in the statement. ("Nyanza" is the province in western Kenya where the first specimen of Nyanzapithecus was found, and "pithecus" comes from the Greek word for "ape.") However, Alesi's teeth were much larger than those of other members of this genus, so the scientists declared that Alesi belonged to a new species, Nyanzipithecus alesi. The shape of the unerupted adult teeth revealed that Alesi belonged to a genus, or group of species, known as Nyanzapithecus, a sister group to the hominoids that was discovered about 30 years ago. "From the teeth, we can tell it generally ate fruits," Miller said. The three-dimensional X-ray images taken of these adult teeth were so detailed that researchers could count their enamel layers, which were laid down over time like rings inside a tree, helping the scientists estimate that the baby primate was 16 months old when it died. The lemon-size skull still had the roots of its baby teeth, and none of the adult teeth had erupted from the jaw yet. However, perhaps the infant was killed by the thick layers of ash from huge volcanic eruptions that covered the fossil, the researchers said. "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.
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