NIGER
1999
Dryopithecus (Proconsul) africanus
Today, the only non-human primate native to Europe is the Barbary macaque, which has extended its North African range to a small area including Gibraltar, on the southern coast of Iberia. The geographic ranges of living apes do not extend north of the tropics. Thus, it may be surprising that once Europe was the home to a considerable diversity of apes. With the warmer and wetter climate of the Miocene, Europe was an ideal habitat for early hominoids, and they extended across the continent from Spain to Turkey, as far north as Paris. What may be even more surprising than the great productivity of Europe for paleontologists seeking Miocene apes is that Europe possibly was the principal center of their evolution and home of the common ancestors of humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas.
For the background to human evolution, the most important European fossil ape is Dryopithecus. The original European ape, Dryopithecus fontani was discovered in France in the 1850Ős. Among the first evidence for ancient primate evolution, these fossil remains have been joined in recent years by newer fossils excavated from Spain, Hungary, and as far east as the Caucasus. These newer sites have extended the sample of Dryopithecus to include relatively complete crania and a diversity of postcranial elements. All remains date to between 13 million and 10 million years ago, likely after the common ancestor of the Asian and African ape clades. The features of the cranial material of Dryopithecus are generally more similar to living African apes than to orangutans (Kordos and Begun, 2001), although fossil Sivapithecus and Dryopithecus are very similar to each other.
