Small-bodied, long-armed apes called gibbons swing rapidly through the trees, far outpacing scientists’ attempts to decipher these creatures’ evolutionary story.
Now, a partial upper jaw and seven isolated teeth found near a southwestern Chinese village have added bite to a suggestion that the earliest known gibbons hung out there about 7 million to 8 million years ago, researchers report in the October Journal of Human Evolution..
Those fossils, as well as 14 teeth previously found at the same site and a nearby site, belong to an ancient hylobatid species called Yuanmoupithecus xiaoyuan, say paleoanthropologist Xueping Ji of the Kunming Natural History Museum of Zoology in China and colleagues. Hylobatids, a family of apes that includes about 20 species of living gibbons and a black-furred gibbon called the siamang, inhabit tropical forests from northeastern India to Indonesia.
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