Asian Roots?

Asian Roots? Burmese find stirs speculation

Where did the primate line that led to man really originate? Lately most of the evidence has pointed to Africa, where scientists have found the bones of a knuckle-walking ape called Dryopithecus, a creature that lived some 20 million years ago and is generally believed to have given rise to both apes and man. This ape's own ancestors seem likely to have lived in Africa as well. As Exhibit A, Duke University Anthropologist Elwyn Simons offered fossils, found near Cairo, of a tree-dwelling primate 30 million years old; Simons christened the creature Aegyptopithecus. Last week, however, a team of Burmese and American scientists created a stir in anthropological circles when they announced that they had found primate fossils in Burma that may be 40 million years old. That could plant man's roots in Southeast Asia.

The telltale fossils, as described by Paleontologist Donald Savage of the University of California, Berkeley, and Anthropologist Russell Ciochon of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, are four lower-jaw fragments. They were found in an ancient seabed in the Pondaung Hills west of Mandalay, embedded below a layer of marine organisms called foraminifera, dating from about 40 million years ago. Associated with the find were other fossils of animals known to have lived during the same period, lending more weight to the fragments' apparent place in time and indicating that the Pondaung Hills had also supported lizards, several kinds of turtles and monstrous crocodiles.

The fossil bones and teeth were not, in fact, the first fragments found in the area. During the 1920s, before Burma broke away from British domination and became an independent country, scientists found similar specimens. The fossils were poorly preserved, but they seemed to represent two slightly differing kinds of primates that were named Pondaungia and Amphipithecus, and their discovery persuaded some anthropologists that the roots of the higher primates lay in Asia. Of the new fragments, all but one have been matched with the original finds.

Both creatures appear to have weighed roughly 30 Ibs. and somewhat resembled a rhesus monkey in body form and size. Their diet was probably fruits and other vegetation. As Savage says: "They were a sort of monkey with apelike teeth, bouncing through the trees." They could thus emerge as an earlier common ancestor than Aegyptopithecus of both apes and monkeys, and as a link back to such lower primates as lemurs and tarsiers. That might put them very near the start of anthropoid evolution; Ciochon speculates that they may have migrated into Africa via western Asia to evolve into later ancestors of early man.

Before most anthropologists agree to accept Asia as the seedbed of the evolution of higher primates, however, more evidence will have to be gathered. Ciochon and Savage plan a return to the Burmese site before year's end. "The door's opened a crack now," says Ciochon, and he and Savage hope to work on a long-range joint project, with any future finds to be placed in Burmese institutions. The four jaw fragments have already been turned over to the Burmese government. Part of the reason is safekeeping. Another part, as the American scientists admit, is to keep them safe from any Burmese jawboning about scientific theft.

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