Anthropologists have a new snapshot for the human family album, and she's got a face only a mother could love: gaping, squarish eyes, a protruding mouth and not much of a forehead.
But who looks attractive after being buried for 10 million years?Ankarapithecus meteai, a 60-pound, fruit-eating ape that roamed the woodlands of central Turkey long before the split that evolutionists believe separated humans from chimps, actually looks pretty good to anthropologists.
For years they've had almost no fossil evidence of what happened to "humanity's ancestors" between about 18 million years ago and 5 million years ago. Finally, anthropologists excavating near Ankara, Turkey, have discovered a fossil ape face more complete than any known from that period.
"I think people are going to be very surprised when they see what this looks like," said John Kappelman, a member of the expedition that discovered the fossil last year.
Kappelman, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and researchers from Ankara University in Turkey, the Finnish Museum of Natural History in Helsinki, and the Natural History Museum in London describe the fossil face in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
The fossil probably didn't belong to a direct ancestor of modern humans; it was more of a cousin, many times removed, anthropologists say. But studying the face will tell anthropologists much more than they now know about the species and the great apes. The great ape group includes gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans.
"There are so few specimens that are as complete as this," said David Pilbeam of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. "Any additional specimen makes a significant increment in our knowledge."
The new Ankarapithecus meteai fossil isn't the first representative of its kind. A jawbone and lower face from the same species were collected during the 1950s in the same place where the new fossil turned up. But those bones, which appear to belong to a male of the species, are much less complete than those of the female that Keppelman and his colleagues found.
The species is named for the city of Ankara, 30 miles south of the site where the fossil was found, and a geological sciences institute there. The "pithecus" part comes from the Greek word for ape.
According to evolutional theory, the actual common ancestors of humans are thought to have lived in Africa at the time that Ankarapithecus meteai occupied Turkey. But fossils of those creatures may never be found, Pilbeam said. Fossil-preserving rocks of the proper age simply aren't exposed on the ground surface anywhere in Africa.
Currently accepted theories about the evolution of the great apes and humans have orangutans breaking away from the other apes between 10 million and 12 million years ago. Other ape groups that exist today would have split off later than that, culminating in the chimpanzee-human split about 5 million or 6 million years ago, evolutionists believe.