Humans are arguably the most successful species on the planet, with over 8 billion individuals on every continent on this planet, and by definition that means apes are the most successful family of animals ever. People often confuse “apes” with monkeys. Apes don’t have tails, apes are larger, apes are smarter, etc. However, just like we’re a form of ape (even if some us hate to admit it), apes are very much just a strange group of monkeys. The general difference here is the aforementioned lack of a tail and a rather large body size.
Apes first evolved in the Miocene epoch when monkeys had started to flourish across the Old World. The earliest definitive ape is Proconsul, an arboreal tailless monkey that was effectively a gibbon of yesterday. From there, a lot of apes flourished in Europe, which was back then a luscious rainforest. Examples include Dryopithecus, a common fossil of the time, and the well-named Oreopithecus – sadly not related to Milk’s favorite cookie 😦 – as well as Asian apes like the Sivapithecus, ancestor to the humble orangutan, dated to 9 mya.
Pongidae or the orangutan family contains some interesting members, one of which is the Gigantopithecus. The largest primate ever known to man, the Gigantopithecus blacki (the largest of four species) weighed in at a whopping 660 lbs. However, specimens are extremely scarce and therefore we cannot infer much about its characteristics. Like today’s orangutans, it would’ve been vegetarian and largely peaceful and was a generalized herbivore. Unlike the orangutan, the Gigantopithecus lived further north in China.
Now, the Gigantopithecus lived relatively recently, from 2 million years ago to just 300,000 years ago, and we don’t know much about it’s ancestors. In fact, the material for this ape is so bad that we thought it was an ancient human at first. Of course, a primate in recent times of this size with little material raises questions about the Yeti or Almaty or the Sasquatch or other generic “wildmen” but that’s another story for another day.
Going back to our tree, eight million years ago, the gorilla’s ancestor split off from our family tree and another million years later and Sahelanthropus tchadensis stood on a frontier. We don’t know if it was the first ape that was more human than chimp or if it was the Last Common Ancestor, but it certainly was an important ancestor, and the first to start walking on two legs. Chimpanzees exhibit bipedalism as well, albeit to a far less efficient way than us, so we cannot determine the extent of their relation. From Sahelanthropus came various apes, in which was Ardipithecus ramidus, the true progenitor of mankind. “Ardi” as the most complete specimen was named, and his kind lived in large social groups, managed to walk on two legs but also scraped by in the trees, and had larger brains and smaller jaws. Where that led to, is a story for tomorrow.
Anay Ganesh 