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12 - A second view from Europe

from Part III - Review of fossil apes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2016

Peter Andrews
Peter Andrews
Affiliation:
Natural History Museum, London
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Summary

During the second half of the middle Miocene and extending into the late Miocene, there was a proliferation of fossil apes in Europe and Asia, postdating the early arrivals described in Chapters 9 and 10 by several million years. There are also a small number of genera and species known in Africa, as mentioned in Chapter 4, and they will be discussed again later, but here I am going to describe the place of the dryopithecines in human ancestry. The genus Dryopithecus has passed through several stages in its history, from the time when it included almost all known fossil apes, after the 1965 revision by Elwyn Simons and David Pilbeam, to the later part of the twentieth century when almost everything except Dryopithecus itself had been removed. The Dryopithecinae now is split into six genera and species, one species to each genus (Table 4.3). This situation will certainly change in the future, with some of the species and genera perhaps being combined and new ones found. For the purposes of this book, I have retained the names currently in use, but to avoid overloading the reader with too many names I will be using mainly the genus names.

No monographic treatment has yet been attempted on the dryopithecines, although Johannes Hürzeler was planning to prepare a monograph on European dryopithecines similar to his one on pliopithecids. At the time when I was touring Europe examining and measuring fossil apes, Hürzeler had collected most of the known dryopithecine fossils at his office in Basel, and he was most generous in sharing the specimens and his thoughts about them with me. Meeting him was one of the highlights of my European tour, but it was frustrating that his work was not completed at the time of his death. My descriptions of dryopithecine morphology has followed his methodology, as has all my taxonomic work on fossil apes, and it is a tribute to him and his far-sighted approach that, at a time when most anthropologists concentrated on naming new species (as they still do today), he was attempting to synthesize and analyse all that was available in the fossil record. In this chapter, I will concentrate on the species with the best-preserved specimens, Hispanopithecus laietanus from Spain.

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An Ape's View of Human Evolution , pp. 184 - 199
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2016

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  • A second view from Europe
  • Peter Andrews, Natural History Museum, London
  • Book: An Ape's View of Human Evolution
  • Online publication: 05 January 2016
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316180938.013
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  • A second view from Europe
  • Peter Andrews, Natural History Museum, London
  • Book: An Ape's View of Human Evolution
  • Online publication: 05 January 2016
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316180938.013
Available formats
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  • A second view from Europe
  • Peter Andrews, Natural History Museum, London
  • Book: An Ape's View of Human Evolution
  • Online publication: 05 January 2016
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316180938.013
Available formats
×