Science Discovers Last Common Ancestor of Humans and Apes

About 13 million years ago, when present-day Kenya was covered in forests, a baby ape died. Its tiny corpse was covered in ash from a nearby volcano, helping to perfectly preserve its fragile cranium.

Now, reports Michael Greshko at National Geographic, that baseball-sized skull is giving researchers insight into a little understood period when the human and ape lineages split.

The discovery of N. Alesi seems to squarely place that lineage in Kenya. But not everyone is convinced by the little skull.

For one, David Begun, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto in Canada argues that human and ape ancestors evolved in Europe before moving into Africa. He tells Dvorsky that he believes other ape specimens, including Proconsul and,

He points out that palaeontologists previously found a 17-million-year old specimen of Nyanzapithecus. “It therefore does not mean that the last common ancestor of all living apes lived 13 million years ago, the age of this fossil,” he says. “It was much older than that.”

UCJ, UNILORIN.