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A newly described fossil suggests that the ancestor of humans and apes arose in Europe, not in Africa...In the new study, the researchers analyzed a newly identified ape fossil from the 8.7 million-year-old site of Çorakyerler in central Anatolia. They dubbed the species Anadoluvius turkae. "Anadolu" is the modern Turkish word for Anatolia, and "turk" refers to Turkey.The fossil suggests that A. turkae likely weighed about 110 to 130 pounds (50 to 60 kilograms), or about the weight of a large male chimpanzee.Based on the fossils of other animals found alongside it — such as giraffes, warthogs, rhinos, antelope, zebras,...

The lineage of humans and apes possibly split at a point several hundred thousand years earlier than currently assumed — and in the eastern Mediterranean rather than sub-Saharan Africa, a German research team claim. After studying the only two fossils found that belong to the hominid Graecopithecus freybergi, researchers at the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment (HEP) in Tübingen came to the remarkable conclusion announced on Monday, and set to be published in the PLOS One magazine. Hominids include humans and our ancestors, plus apes and their predecessors. Scientists have still to definitively prove when the lineage of...

T he history of human evolution has been rewritten after scientists discovered that Europe was the birthplace of mankind, not Africa.  Currently, most experts believe that our human lineage split from apes around seven million years ago in central Africa, where hominids remained for the next five million years before venturing further afield. But two fossils of an ape-like creature which had human-like teeth have been found in Bulgaria and Greece, dating to 7.2 million years ago. The discovery of the creature, named Graecopithecus freybergi, and nicknameded ‘El Graeco' by scientists, proves our ancestors were already starting to evolve in...