Scientists extracted genetic material from fossils of great apes 1.9 million years ago

Xinhua) -- Chinese and Danish scientists have successfully extracted genetic material from 1.9 million-year-old fossils of great apes, revealing the origin and evolution of the long-extinct great ape, according to a study published in the November 13 issue of the journal Nature.
, co-author of the paper and Ph.D., Guangxi National Museum, said the genetic material was extracted from a tooth fossil of a great ape from a cave in Tiandong County, Guangxi Province.
, the great ape is the largest primate known to live on Earth. Fossils of great apes have been found dating back between 2 million and 300,000 years. The great apes were once widely distributed in southern China, and most of the 17 fossil sites found so far are in southwestern Guangxi. The great ape has huge teeth and jaws, two to three times the size of a human, and is estimated to be more than 2 meters tall and weigh more than 300 kilograms.
great ape fossils were first discovered in the 1930s. In the 1950s and 1960s, Chinese palaeontologists first found the exact origin of great ape fossils in Guangxi. Liao Wei said that in recent years, Chinese paleoanthmatologists have found a large number of great ape fossils from different periods in cave deposits at the edge of the Baise Basin and Chongzhou area of Guangxi, and initially made clear the time when the great apes appeared and perished in southern China. In nearly a century of exploration and research, paleoanthrologists have basically confirmed that great apes are a sideline in the human evolutionary system, but the question of the origin and evolution of great apes has long plagued the academic community.
May 2018, wang Wei, a professor at Shandong University's Institute of Cultural Heritage, and the Evolutionary Genome Laboratory at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark extracted and sequenced genetic material from the fossil of the great ape's teeth in Tiandong County, Guangxi Province. The researchers extracted genetic information from the 1.9 million-year-old great ape's teeth. This is the first time scientists have successfully extracted genetic information from such ancient fossils from subtropical regions. The results suggest that great apes have the closest kinship with Asian orangutans, who now live in Southeast Asia, separated from the orangutan family about 12 million years ago and evolved independently.
in subtropical regions, genetic material information from fossils more than 10,000 years old is difficult to preserve intact. But the tooth enamel of the great ape is thick and hard, forming a closed system, coupled with the discovery of the fossil site is a relatively stable temperature and humidity cave, the preservation of the fossil is also more favorable, these conditions add up, so that researchers successfully extract genetic material from it, research breakthrough. Wang Wei said.Enrique Capellini, a professor at the University of Copenhagen and the co-author of the
paper, said scientists had previously tried to find creatures most similar to great apes, but could only compare the shape of fossils with existing ape-like bone references, and the evolutionary relationship between great apes and similar species could be clearly known by sequencing proteins extracted from tooth enamel nearly 2 million years ago.