Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 How can we recognize common ancestors?
- Part I Apes: their morphology and behaviour
- PART II Environments and palaeoenvironments
- Part III Review of fossil apes
- 7 The view from the early Miocene
- 8 The environment in the early Miocene
- 9 The view from the middle Miocene
- 10 Specialized apes from the middle Miocene
- 11 The environment during the middle Miocene
- 12 A second view from Europe
- 13 The environment in Europe
- 14 Late Miocene to Pleistocene apes
- 15 Apes, hominins and environment in the late Miocene
- Part IV Last common ancestor
- References and further reading
- Index
- References
12 - A second view from Europe
from Part III - Review of fossil apes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 How can we recognize common ancestors?
- Part I Apes: their morphology and behaviour
- PART II Environments and palaeoenvironments
- Part III Review of fossil apes
- 7 The view from the early Miocene
- 8 The environment in the early Miocene
- 9 The view from the middle Miocene
- 10 Specialized apes from the middle Miocene
- 11 The environment during the middle Miocene
- 12 A second view from Europe
- 13 The environment in Europe
- 14 Late Miocene to Pleistocene apes
- 15 Apes, hominins and environment in the late Miocene
- Part IV Last common ancestor
- References and further reading
- Index
- References
Summary
During the second half of the middle Miocene and extending into the late Miocene, there was a proliferation of fossil apes in Europe and Asia, postdating the early arrivals described in Chapters 9 and 10 by several million years. There are also a small number of genera and species known in Africa, as mentioned in Chapter 4, and they will be discussed again later, but here I am going to describe the place of the dryopithecines in human ancestry. The genus Dryopithecus has passed through several stages in its history, from the time when it included almost all known fossil apes, after the 1965 revision by Elwyn Simons and David Pilbeam, to the later part of the twentieth century when almost everything except Dryopithecus itself had been removed. The Dryopithecinae now is split into six genera and species, one species to each genus (Table 4.3). This situation will certainly change in the future, with some of the species and genera perhaps being combined and new ones found. For the purposes of this book, I have retained the names currently in use, but to avoid overloading the reader with too many names I will be using mainly the genus names.
No monographic treatment has yet been attempted on the dryopithecines, although Johannes Hürzeler was planning to prepare a monograph on European dryopithecines similar to his one on pliopithecids. At the time when I was touring Europe examining and measuring fossil apes, Hürzeler had collected most of the known dryopithecine fossils at his office in Basel, and he was most generous in sharing the specimens and his thoughts about them with me. Meeting him was one of the highlights of my European tour, but it was frustrating that his work was not completed at the time of his death. My descriptions of dryopithecine morphology has followed his methodology, as has all my taxonomic work on fossil apes, and it is a tribute to him and his far-sighted approach that, at a time when most anthropologists concentrated on naming new species (as they still do today), he was attempting to synthesize and analyse all that was available in the fossil record. In this chapter, I will concentrate on the species with the best-preserved specimens, Hispanopithecus laietanus from Spain.
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- An Ape's View of Human Evolution , pp. 184 - 199Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016