New Fossils Reveal The Mother Continent for South American Monkeys

Illustration of Perupithecus ucayaliensis by Jorge González

Arguably one of the best nicknames for the continent Africa is that of 'The Mother Continent', a name owing to the fact that our own Mitochondrial Eve can be traced to this location. However, Homo sapiens was not the only primate species to derive out of Africa. A paper recently published in the journal Nature has revealed new fossil material which sheds light on the origins of South America’s iconic monkey species. In 2010, a team of paleontologists led by Los Angeles County Natural History Museum curator Dr. Ken Campbell uncovered the teeth of three novel extinct primates in the east Peruvian Amazon. The first specimen took two years to identify as a result of its anatomy being distinct from that of modern day South American monkeys, the platyrrhines. The date of this species was traced to the Eocene epoch approximately 36 million years ago, making it ten million years older than any other fossil platyrrhine known. As a result, the newly named Perupithecus ucayaliensis is considered by scientists as a significant piece of the puzzle that is the evolutionary history of South American monkeys.

New Study Reveals When Juvenile Neanderthals Stopped Consuming Milk

A skeleton of a juvenile Neanderthal

A study was recently released through the scientific paper Nature, which details an interesting discovery regarding the behavior and lifestyle our closest extinct relatives. A team of researchers from the United States and Australia announced in the paper that they have gained the ability to calculate when Neanderthal juveniles began weaning (to become accustomed to a diet other than a mother's milk) through examination of fossil teeth. Intriguingly, this new examination technique was partially based off of information from studies of modern Homo sapiens and monkey teeth. By examining the traces of barium in the tooth, which can help determine when a primate had an exclusive diet of milk and when it began and completed the weaning process, the researchers were able to determine that juvenile Neanderthals stopped having a milk exclusive diet after seven months. This pattern of seven months of an exclusive milk diet and seven months of a supplementation diet away from milk is intriguingly similar to that of modern day Homo sapiens, thus revealing more similarities between Neanderthals and our own species. To read more about this extremely interesting breakthrough in Neanderthal research and the techniques which were used to accomplish it, click the link below:
Monkey teeth help reveal Neanderthal weaning