Anthropological and Paleontological Research at the Fossil Primate Sites of the Fayum, Egypt

该项目的研究人员将在埃及进行三个野外季节，随后将在杜克大学和合作实验室对发现的化石进行研究。其目的是更多地了解猴子、猿类和人类的最早祖先。之前的发现使这里成为世界上进行此类研究的最重要地点。在预计的季节，法尤姆地区的遗址将产生许多始新世和渐新世时代的早期灵长类动物的头骨、颌骨和骨骼部分。这些化石的年代大约在3600万到2600万年之间。化石来自十几个采石场，很少被发现为相关的骨骼，因此需要花费很长时间的巨大努力，才能通过发现以前不为人知的、往往是不相关的肢体骨骼和头骨来增加知识，这些骨骼和头骨是在那里发现的20多种灭绝的灵长类动物。其中大多数只有上颌和下颌的部分代表，因此，还有很多有待发现的地方。非洲似乎是猴子、猿猴和人类群体经历其历史大部分时间的大陆，法尤姆在有关时间的早期拥有非洲唯一连续的矿床序列。

The researchers in this project will conduct three field seasons in Egypt with subsequent studies on recovered fossils to be carried out at Duke and cooperating laboratories. The objective is to learn more about the earliest forerunners of monkeys, apes and humans. Previous discoveries have made this the world's most important location for such research. During the projected seasons, sites in the Fayum region will yield skulls, jaws, and skeletal parts from many early primates of both Eocene and Oligocene age. These date between about 36 and 26 million years old. Fossils come from a dozen quarries and are seldom recovered as associated skeletons, so that great diligence over long periods of time is required to add knowledge by finding previously unknown and often unassociated limb bones and skulls of the more than twenty extinct primate species that occur there. Most of these are represented only by parts of upper and lower jaws and, hence, much remains to be discovered. Africa appears to be the continent where the group of monkeys, apes and humans experienced most of its history and the Fayum holds the only continuous sequence of deposits in Africa during the early part of the time concerned.