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Fossil ape skull confirms African origin of apes and humans

13-million-year-old “Alesi“, a fossil discovered in Kenya, sheds light on ape ancestry

The discovery in Kenya of a remarkably complete fossil ape skull reveals what the common ancestor of all living apes and humans may have looked like. The find belongs to an infant which lived about 13 million years ago. The research was done by an international team led by Isaiah Nengo of Stony Brook University-affiliated Turkana Basin Institute and De Anza College, USA. Senior author Fred Spoor of UCL in the UK and of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, was part of the research team.

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© Fred Spoor