Kenyapithecus africanus
| Kenyapithecus africanus | ||||||||||||
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| lower Miocene | ||||||||||||
| 15.0 to 14.0 million years | ||||||||||||
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Kenyapithecus africanus | ||||||||||||
| Le Gros Clark & Leakey , 1967 | ||||||||||||
Kenyapithecus africanus is an extinct species of primates in the genus Kenyapithecus that was foundin Kenya during the early Miocene . Fossils discoveredon the island of Rusinga in Lake Victoria , which were identified in 1967 on this species, come from a layer of earth whose age wasdated to around 15 million years agousing the potassium-argon method and biostratigraphic analyzes; Finds from other locations may be a million years younger.
Naming
Kenyapithecus is an artificial word . The name of the genus is derived from the location in Kenya ( English : Kenya) and from the Greek word πίθηκος ( pronounced píthēkos in ancient Greek : "monkey"). The epithet africanus refers to the place where it was found in Africa . Kenyapithecus africanus therefore means "African monkey from Kenya".
Initial description
As holotype of kenyapithecus africanus was the first description , the upper jaw fragment CMH 6 from the Rusinga-reference R. designated 106, which was discovered in 1948 and in the Natural History Museum in London is kept. This fossil was first named Sivapithecus africanus by Wilfrid Le Gros Clark and Louis Leakey in 1950 . The delimitation of Kenyapithecus wickeri was based exclusively on features of the dentition, whereby several other finds (several dentate lower and upper jaw fragments as well as individual teeth) were included in the description of these differences .
Tribal classification
The assignment of the genus Kenyapithecus to a family in the genealogical tree of the human species was expressly referred to in the first description by Louis Leakey in 1961 as incertae sedis (“unclear”), and this is still true, even if Louis Leakey wrote in 1967 that “in the past Most experts are unanimously of the opinion that Kenyapithecus [...] should be regarded as an early representative of the Hominidae . "
The assignment of the species to the genus Kenyapithecus is now controversial. In 1999, following the discovery of the partial skeleton KNM-TH 28860, it was proposed to merge the fossils that had been placed on Kenyapithecus africanus and various other finds in the newly named genus Equatorius as Equatorius africanus .
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c L. SB Leakey : An Early Miocene Member of Hominidae. In: Nature , Volume 213, 1967, pp. 155-163, doi: 10.1038 / 213155a0
- ^ WE Le Gros Clark, LSB Leakey: The Miocene Hominoidea of East Africa. In: Fossil Mammals of Africa. No. 1, British Museum of Natural History, 1950.
- ↑ LSB Leakey: A new Lower Pliocene fossil primate from Kenya. In: The Annals & Magazine of Natural History. Volume 4, Series 13, 1961, pp. 689-696.
- ^ Camilo J. Cela-Conde, Francisco José Ayala: Human Evolution. Trails from the past. Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 64-67.
- ↑ Steve Ward, Barbara Brown, Andrew Hill, Jay Kelley, Will Downs: Equatorius: A New Hominoid Genus from the Middle Miocene of Kenya. In: Science . Volume 285, No. 5432, 1999, pp. 1382-1386, doi: 10.1126 / science.285.5432.1382 .