Our common ancestor
Tarsier, there are 5 species,
They are very small nocturnal primates with large eyes. Although called monkeys, they are not monkeys and are still primates. The common ancestors were great-grandfathers of ours 6 million years ago.
appearance:
Even though tarsiers were nocturnal, our common ancestor with them may have been daytime, so this common ancestor, like the previous ones, still had color vision. The tarsier is a primate with a very small body size, 85 mm to 160 mm long, a tail length of 130 mm to 270 mm, and a weight of 80 g to 165 g; soft back hair texture, gray hair with a silver luster, light gray abdominal hair; round head, face plate forward, snout and cervical vertebrae, thin and hairless ear shell; very large eyes, up to 16 mm in diameter, suitable for night vision; short neck, which is characteristic of many jumping groups; short forelimbs, long hind limbs, and round suction cups at the tip of the toes, which can stay on the surface of many smooth objects The tail is slender and hairy at the end of the tail.
Like many nocturnal animals, tarsiers have large eyes. In fact, each of its eyes weighs 3 grams, which is heavier than its brain. It is very disproportionate to its small body. It was as if he was wearing an extra-large pair of old-fashioned reading glasses. Therefore, people gave it a very vivid name: tarsier. If measured in proportion to their bodies, tarsiers can win many individual titles among primates: the largest eyes, the largest ears, and the longest toe bones.
Life Habits:
Tarsiers prefer to live in dense secondary forests and bushes, and are also found in primary forests. Sleeping during the day, being active at night, able to jump among the branches of the trees, at a distance of several meters, but never moving down to the ground. Hearing is sharp and the neck can be rotated almost 360. It mainly preys on insects. Small lizards are also eaten and move extremely quickly when catching food.
Tarsiers clumsily move slowly along branches, but usually they move by jumping. When jumping, they suddenly straighten their long hind legs and jump into the air, and then land on another tree 2 meters away from them. It can also make halfway turns if necessary.
Baby tarsiers are well developed when they are born. They have thick fur and open eyes, and they are born to climb and grasp their mother's hair. If the female tarsier has to walk a long way, she will choose to take the cub in her mouth and take it with her.
The tarsier can keep its body still and make its head rotate almost exactly, which helps it spot prey and avoid enemies. Tarsiers are highly adaptable to jumping from trees and can jump very accurately between trees at distances of 3 meters. Tarsiers are unsociable, often solitary, and sometimes in pairs.
The lifespan of tarsiers is 15 to 20 years, and they are extremely nostalgic, and they will die without the land where they grow. In the Philippines, attempts to take tarsiers elsewhere to feed have failed. Tarsiers in the wild are very shy, they are not used to dealing with people, and only a small number of tarsiers who grow up in captive environments do not mind this gentle and friendly contact. In addition to sleeping and holding branches in a daze, tarsiers are most concerned about eating bugs.
Tarsiers are arboreal animals found in the dense tropical forests of Southeast Asia and live on some islands in the Philippines and along the southern Indonesian island of Sumatra. In recent years, the Philippines has lost its habitat to habitat due to fewer and fewer forests, causing the tarsier to lose its habitat and thus face the brink of extinction. Tarsier wives can only give birth to one baby a year, and because the number is already small, it is becoming more and more delicate. Tarsiers are now endangered.
Relationship with humans:
Since Darwin,
The knowledge of human origin and evolution has always had a rigorous and mechanical color, and this order system like a building block has been perfected little by little by paleoanthropologists such as Raymond Dart and Richard Leakey. They feel that without some sort of evolutionary link between lower and higher primates, the entire study of human origins will inevitably stall.
The first to challenge traditional theories was Dr. Chris Beard, a paleoanthropologist at the Carnegie Museum. In 1990, he discovered several relatively complete skull fossils from about 50.5 million years ago in the Wind River Basin in central Wyoming, USA, which proved to belong to the ancient Edopheaeidae and are close relatives of the famous American Dessonii monkeys. Its appearance has the characteristics of both today's tarsiers and advanced primates, especially in the vascular and nerve-dense ear bone parts, almost identical to modern tarsiers.
The discovery not only created an intermediate link between the two distinct primate populations, but also led Beard and colleagues to conclude that the source of contemporary advanced primates should move forward. It is also closely associated with lower primates. Given that these fossils have evolved distinctly in favor of modern tarsiers, there must have been members of the more ancient family of archaeopters with primitive features of high and low primates. It is well known that among all the existing lower primates, the tarsier can be regarded as the closest to their advanced distant relatives in the evolutionary sequence: for example, its eyeball has a retinal fovea that only advanced primates have, and this inconspicuous small indentation can make the image felt by the brain feel three-dimensional.
The choroidal blanket common to lower primates cannot be found in its eyeballs. In 1991, Dr. Beard published his first study on the origins of the primordial monkey and the higher primates, but it drew nearly as much criticism as it received. Opponents' firepower has largely focused on the fact that Beard lacks enough analysis of fossils of senior primates to support his assertion. Indeed, until then, the oldest fossils of higher primates were only about 35 million years old, and there was a gap of at least 15 million years in the era in which the Monkeys lived.
In desperation, Beard had to pin his hopes on the cradle of mankind, Africa.
Attempts to find more ancient fossils of higher primates there. His good friend, Marc Gaudner, an anthropologist at the French National Center for natural science research, had discovered several ape molars dating back 40 million years in western Algeria, reinforcing Beard's determination to find the "missing chain of evolution" there. However, after some futile investigation, Asia gradually replaced Africa as the treasure trove of major clues in Beard's mind for the simplest reason: first, the tarsier is mainly distributed in Southeast Asia, which is likely to indicate that the evolutionary shunting of it and the advanced primates occurred in neighboring Eurasia; second, since the 1970s, many fossils of primates with a history of 40 million to 4.5 million years have been unearthed in Asia. With the assistance of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 1994 and 1997 respectively, they discovered the "Chinese Shu Ape" and "Century Shu Ape" in Liyang, Jiangsu Province, and Yuanqu, Shanxi, respectively, and these new members of these advanced primate families not only made ancient Asia a new hot spot in the origin of ancient humans, but also delineated a new direction for the academic community to study human evolution.