Into Africa: The Initial Colonization of Africa by Early Cenozoic Anthropoids

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This project investigates the evolutionary consequences of the initial colonization of Africa by early anthropoid primates (extinct relatives of monkeys, apes and humans). Working in Eocene strata exposed along the Dur At-Talah escarpment in southern Libya, an international team of scientists based at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, the University of Poitiers in France, and Tripoli University in Libya will search for additional fossils and related forms of data bearing on the earliest known African anthropoids. The project will provide training opportunities for two postdoctoral researchers based at the Carnegie Museum as well as undergraduate and graduate students from the United States and Libya. Results will be disseminated through scholarly publications, popular media, museum exhibitions, and public lectures and seminars.Understanding how the colonization of new landmasses by invading groups of organisms affects both the invaders themselves and the local biota they encounter is a widespread problem in organismal biology. Only recently has it become apparent that anthropoid primates experienced such a pivotal event during their evolution, when they colonized what was then the island continent of Africa from their ancestral homeland in Asia. This research project provides new data that will help constrain the nature and timing of this colonization event by focusing on fossil sites in southern Libya that have recently yielded the oldest known African anthropoids. By recovering additional fossils and other geological data from these sites, it will be possible to assess: (1) whether early African anthropoids are descendants of one (as opposed to multiple) ancestral Asian forms; (2) whether early African anthropoids experienced a dramatic evolutionary radiation after their successful colonization of that landmass, which may have been related to the evolution of modern anthropoid anatomical features; and (3) whether other Asian mammals may have colonized Africa at roughly the same time that anthropoids achieved their initial toehold there.The project and its international components are receiving joint support within NSF from the Global Venture Fund of the Office of International Science and Engineering.