Scientists have found fossils closest to the ancestors of the golden monkey

News (Reporter Zhang Yong) Recently, the international anthropological authoritative publication "Human Evolution" with "widely distributed (in Eurasia) in the easternst representative of the Central and New World Monkeys - The discovery of monkeys in China Zhaotong" and "East Asia's oldest warthogs with bones" as the title, the same time published two papers online. The paper suggests that the fossils of chinese monkeys found in Zhaotong Reservoir Dam in Yunnan are those closest to the ancestors of golden monkeys 6.4 million years ago. This is the latest results of the Research on the Zhaotong New Era Ancient Ape Group, co-chaired by the Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology of Yunnan Province and the University of Pennsylvania.
According to Ji Xueping, a researcher at Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, the monkey is one of the first primate fossils recorded by the academic community, discovered more than 160 years ago in the Peckmi region near Athens, Greece, and later found in europe, West Asia and South Asia from 8.2 million to 7.1 million years ago, is one of the most geographically widely distributed non-human primate fossils. Discovered in 2009 and 2010, the zhaotong monkey fossil specimen is the first time the species has reached the easternst eastern part of Eurasia and the first time the genus has been found in East Asia. The newly discovered chinese monkey is a female individual weighing about 7.26 to 7.11 kg, which is at the same age as the Zhaotong ancient ape. This is one of two known sites where monkeys and ancient apes live together in Eurasia, reflecting the fact that the two primates can use forests and open woodlands, respectively, or in an environment inlaid with "patchy" grasslands, to avoid food competition and extinction.
At the end of the 20th century, a number of previous morphological studies by china's
Kunming Zoological Research Institute and other research institutions speculated that the ancestors of Asian golden monkeys should be ancient primates similar to those of Chinese monkeys, but paleontologists have not found fossil evidence to support them. In 2012, a study in molecular biology concluded that the earliest ancestors of golden monkeys evolved from a monkey species in Yunnan, China, between 7.3 million and 6.7 million years ago. Fossils found at zhaotong reservoir dam confirm this inference. Future research teams will also look for more late-on-age evolutionary "missing rings" to further track the coupling of environmental change and biological evolution in Asia.
and quantitative analysis of anatomy features show that the monkeys found in Zhaotong are the same species found in Europe. For 7 million years, due to the persistent drought in southeastern Europe, and East Asia due to the rise of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and the formation of the Asian monsoon climate, the environmental impact on tropical-subtropical forests has been slow, until 4 to 3 million years ago the environment began to deteriorate rapidly in the direction of dry and cold, thus preserving the environment suitable for the survival of ancient species of new era plants and animals and the formation of new species. Zhaotong Reservoir Dam 6.5 million to 6 million years ago, dense forest, open woodland and patchy grassland between the edge of the lake and mum still water environment, summer is relatively warm and humid, winter is relatively dry and cold, but the degree of seasonal change is relatively weak. Because of the variability of its motor function, European monkeys can adapt to a variety of latitudes, temperatures and rainfall environments, as well as eating fruit, leaves and nuts, seeds and other granular variety of food, so that they can move along the southern forest corridor long distance, to the southern East Asian forest wide forest "sanctuary" (Zhaotong) to survive, and eventually evolved into some or all of the living Asian warthogs, more likely the most primitive ancestors of the living golden monkey species.
The study was co-chaired by the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, and involved scholars from domestic and foreign research institutions such as Nina G. Jablongski and Dionisios Youlatos, first author and co-author of the study, as well as scholars from Aristotle University in Greece, the
Institute of Geology and Geophysics in China, and Harvard University in the United States.