(Image: Paul Tafforeau (ESRF) and Xijun Ni (Chinese Academy of Sciences))
Could this tiny animal, with a body just seven centimetres long, be the ancestor of all living primates – including humans?
For now, its official classification makes it a tarsier cousin of ours, one step removed on our primate family tree. But we have spoken to a few palaeontologists who know the fossil well, and they say there’s a chance we may one day realise Archicebus achilles is in fact a direct ancestor of humans.
At 55 million years old, A. achilles (or Archie, as we’ve taken to calling it at New Scientist) is the oldest primate skeleton ever found, and one of the most primitive.
According to its discoverers, Archie is a primitive tarsier – a group of primates closely related to monkeys, apes and humans. That would mean it is descended from the ancestor of all primates, but is not itself the ancestor.
That may not be the end of the story, though. Marc Godinot of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, is not entirely convinced that Archie’s snout is short enough to prove it is a tarsier, as its discoverers claim. “Here we have a primate which is so primitive that it could be the primitive primate,” says Godinot.
Discover Archie’s full story, including how it evolved and its relationship to us, in “Our earliest primate cousin discovered in Asia“.
Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature12200
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