Researchers find prehistoric ape fossils

By Michael Kahn

LONDON (Reuters) - Researchers working in Ethiopia have unearthed the fossils of a 10-million-year-old ape, a discovery they say suggests that humans and African great apes may have split much earlier than thought.

The Ethiopian and Japanese team named the species Chororapithecus abyssinicus and said it represents the earliest recognised primate directly related to modern-day gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos.

"The human fossil record goes back six to seven million years, but we know nothing about how the human line actually emerged from apes," the researchers said in a statement on Wednesday that accompanied publication of their study in Nature magazine.

"Chororapithecus gives us the first glimpse of the ape side background to the human origins story."

The researchers found the fossils in steep, rough terrain about 170 km (105 miles) east of Addis Ababa.

The team, which dug up one canine tooth and eight molars, determined the molars were from a great ape because they shared special characteristics with modern gorillas for eating fibrous food such as stems and leaves.

They concluded Chororapithecus was either a primitive form of gorilla or an independent branch showing a similar adaptation at about the time when the gorilla line was emerging elsewhere.

"If it's not a gorilla relative, then it's something very similar to what an early gorilla must have looked like", Gen Suwa of the University of Tokyo, one of the researchers, said.