Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 12, 1992 TAG: 9203120085
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
The finding in Namibia of a 13-million-year-old partial jawbone "opens up a whole new geographical area for exploration into prehuman ancestry," said Glenn Conroy, one of the researchers reporting the find.
The discovery in southwestern Africa is the first example of what scientists call Miocene hominoids to be found south of equatorial sites in Kenya and Uganda, researchers said.
The newly discovered creature apparently lived before hominoids evolved into two branches, with one branch leading eventually to humans and the other to chimps and gorillas, Conroy said. That split is thought to have occurred 5 million to 10 million years ago.
The fossil is the right side of a lower jaw, including some teeth. The size of the teeth suggests the creature was about as big as a small chimpanzee, weighing around 35 pounds, said Conroy, a professor of anatomy and anthropology at the Washington University Medical School in St. Louis.
A wisdom tooth had appeared, showing the creature was an adult, perhaps about 10 years old when it died, he said in a telephone interview. That age is considered mature because of the creature's rate of development.
The tooth shapes show it ate soft plants, probably including lots of fruit, he said. Its environment must have been more humid and forested than the very dry surroundings that exist there now, Conroy said.
Conroy reports the discovery in today's issue of the journal Nature with Martin Pickford of the Paleontology Institute of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, who found the fossil last June, and other scientists.
The scientists named the creature Otavipithecus namibiensis, because it was found in the Otavi region of northern Namibia.
by CNB