The ancestor of the Asian golden snub-nosed monkey may be the 6.4 million-year-old Zhaotong Chinese monkey Ji Xueping, a researcher at the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, courtesy of Ji Xueping
Yunnan Netnews (reporter Cai Houyou) On September 2, the reporter learned from the Yunnan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology that on August 7 and August 28, 2020, the international authoritative journal of anthropology "Journal of Human Evolution" was respectively titled "The Easternmost Representative of the Broadly Distributed (in Eurasian) Miocene Monkey Family---The Discovery of the Ben Delhi Chinese Monkey in Zhaotong, China" and "The Oldest Colossal Calcaneus in East Asia". At the same time, two latest results of the study of the Neogene paleontological fauna of Zhaotong co-hosted by the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and Pennsylvania State University in the United States were published online. The results of the study suggest that the ancestors of the Asian golden snub-nosed monkey may have been the Zhaotong Middle Monkey 6.4 million years ago.
The middle monkey is one of the earliest primate fossils recorded by the academic community, found more than 160 years ago in the Pikermi region near Athens, Greece, and later found in Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, Pakistan and other European, West Asian and South Asian strata dating back 8.20-7.1 million years ago, is one of the most geographically distributed non-human primate fossil representatives.
The fossil specimens of the Monkey in Zhaotong were discovered in 2009 and 2010, which is the fossil record of the species reaching the easternmost part of Eurasia and the first discovery of the genus in East Asia. The newly discovered middle monkey is a female individual weighing about 7.26--7.11 kg, which is about the same era as the Zhaotong ancient ape. It is one of two known sites of symbiosis between monkeys and apes in Eurasia, reflecting the fact that these two primates could use forests and open woodlands or "patchy" meadows to avoid food competition and become extinct, respectively.
Detailed anatomical feature comparison and quantitative analysis showed that the monkey found by Zhaotong was the same species as the European discovery. For 7 million years, due to the continuous drought in southeastern Europe, and the uplift of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and the formation of the Asian monsoon climate in East Asia, the environmental impact on tropical-subtropical forests has been relatively slow, and it was not until 3-4 million years ago that the environment began to deteriorate rapidly in the direction of dry and cold, thus preserving an environment suitable for the survival of ancient species of Neogene animals and plants and the formation of new species. Multidisciplinary comprehensive research shows that Zhaotong Shuitang Dam was densely forested 6.5-6 million years ago, with a still water environment at the edge of a lake with open woodland and patchy grassland, relatively warm and humid in summer, and relatively dry and cold in winter, but the degree of seasonal variation is relatively weak. Due to the variability of its motor function, the European middle monkey can adapt to various latitudes, temperatures and rainfall environments, as well as the multiplicity of granular foods such as fruits, leaves, nuts and seeds, so that it can migrate along the southern forest corridor for a long time, to survive in the forest-wide "refuge" (Zhaotong) in the forests of southern East Asia, and eventually evolved into some or all of the living Asian colobus monkeys, and more likely the most primitive ancestors of the living golden snub-nosed monkeys.
At the end of the last century, a number of pre-human morphological studies at research institutions such as the Kunming Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences speculated that the ancestors of the Asian golden snub-nosed monkey should be paleoptera similar to the middle monkey, but paleontologists have not found fossil evidence to support it. In 2012, a molecular biology study concluded that the earliest ancestors of the golden snub-nosed monkey should have evolved from a monkey in The Yunnan region of China between 6.7 and 7.3 million years ago. Fossils found at the Zhaotong Pond Dam confirm the above inference. In the future, the research team will also look for more late evolutionary "missing rings" to further track the coupling phenomenon of environmental change and biological evolution in Asia.
The study was co-chaired by the Yunnan Institute of Antiquities and Archaeology and the University of Pennsylvania, with Researcher Ji Xueping, Professor Nina G. Jablongski, and Professor Dionisios Youlatos as the first author and co-corresponding author, respectively, aristotle University in Greece, Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Harvard University, Cleveland Museum of Natural History, University of Arizona, Yunnan University, Northwestern University, University of Western Australia, Scholars from the Kunming Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Zhaotong Institute of Cultural Relics Protection and Archaeology, and the Zhaoyang District Museum participated in the research. The project is jointly funded by the Strategic Pilot Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Category B), the Natural Science Foundation of the United States, the University of Pennsylvania, the Natural Science Foundation of Yunnan Province, the Belmar College of the United States, zhaotong city and the people's government of Zhaoyang district.
Since the 1960s, more than 5,000 fossils of ancient elephants, ancient ape skulls and other mammals and plants have been found in the Shuitangba Community of Taiping Office, Zhaotong City, zhaotong City, which is known as the "refuge" of species 6 million years ago, which has aroused sensation and attention at home and abroad. Why did the Miocene ape in Asia mysteriously disappear after 6 million years? Why did the first humans appear in Africa during the absence of Asian apes? Why are many of the paleovertebrates in The Pond Dam so large? Why is it rare that a large number of bird fossils are stored in a concentrated manner... Despite the fruitful scientific research results of paleontology in the Shuitangba fossil site, the current Shuitangba paleontological fossil group still leaves many mysteries to be solved.