Oréopithèque

The oréopithèque ( Oreopithecus bambolii ) is a prehistoric primate dating from the Miocène which one found fossils in Italy (Toscane and Sardinia) and in Eastern Africa. The generic name comes from the Greek and means “monkey of the hills”, the name of the Espèce refers instead of the first discovered one at the end of the 19th century, Assembles it Bamboli to Tuscany.

History

Oréopithèque could go down from the Dryopithèque. It evolved/moved in a way isolated during at least two million years in the Mediterranean, in an island which was to become Tuscany of today. There was no large predator and the monkeys did not have natural enemies. Later, probably for a glacial period, when the sea level dropped in the whole world, a ground bridge appeared and connected the island to the continent. New species, and among them the large predatory ones, had then the possibility of invading this isolated environment where animals as Oréopithèque were easy preys. Very quickly this strange primate, like other creatures of the island, disappeared forever. One thinks immediately of what arrived when a ground bridge between North America and South America linked the two continents.

A very old bipédie

The habitat of Oréopithèque seems to have consisted of marshes and not of Savane S or forests. The fossils are rather many and complete to observe a certain number of features characteristic of a certain adaptation to walk in right station: width of the heel, lumbar curve, morphology of the femur and the basin. Its short face and its teeth also contributed to lead certain researchers to initially bring it closer to the Hominides.

The fossils of Oréopithèque going back to approximately 8 million years, they represent a very old appearance of a form of bipédie, unknown factor at the other species of primates contemporary or immediately posterior. Some see there an argument in favor of the assumption of the watery monkey supposed explaining the appearance of the human bipédie. The bipédie of Oréopithèque agrees well with the possibility of an old evolution of the Hominidé S, as lets it think cranium of Toumaï, old man from six to seven million years but presenting according to its discoverers of the human features.

So some thus estimate that Oréopithèque implies to re-examine the current consensus on the chronology of the bipédie in the history of the human evolution, a consensu is far from being established in the paleontologists. The locomotion of Oréopithèque is probably not exclusively biped: its upper limbs are clearly adapted to the suspension. Moreover, its foot evokes the legs of birds and presents an anatomy different from that of the first biped ancestors of the man. It is thus possible to consider an arboricolous life accompanied by biped displacements on the ground, made possible by the insular medium and the absence of predatory. This bipédie is however different from those of the Australopithecus and the Man.

Oréopithèque can thus represent a development independent of the bipédie, which differs from that which led to the current men and who besides ended to a dead end some time later. New discoveries of fossils will be able to help to answer this question and good of others. In the same way, the taxonomic position of Oréopithèque changes unceasingly. Some scientists see in him very first the Catarhinien, little time after separation of with the monkeys of the New World. Other scientists place it in the line of the Hominides right before the separation of the orang-outangs of with the remainder of the large monkeys.

Reference

B. Senut, “the emergence of the family of the man”, in At the origins of humanity , vol. 1, Y. Coppens and P. Picq (to dir.), Beech, (2001), ISBN 2-213-60369-3

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