"The shape of the Asian Afrasia and the North African Afrotarsius fossils suggest these animals probably ate insects.
The size of their teeth hints that in life these animals weighed around 3.5 ounces (100 grams), roughly the size of a modern tarsier."
So, now we know. Our pregenitor was a 3.5 ounce AFrasia.
"It remains an open question how early anthropoids actually migrated from Asia to Africa. Back then, the two continents were separated by a more extensive version of the modern Mediterranean Sea, called the Tethys Sea. Early anthropoids may have either swum from island to island from Asia to Africa, or possibly have been carried on naturally occurring rafts of logs and other material washed out to sea by floods and storms.
Other animal groups apparently migrated from Asia to Africa at this time as well, such as rodents and extinct piglike animals known as anthracotheres, Jaeger said.
After early anthropoids made their way to Africa, those left behind apparently died out in Asia.
Around 34 million years ago, there was a dramatic glacial event that cooled the world climate and affected Asia more than Africa. During that crisis, we suppose that all primitive Asian anthropoids disappeared," Jaeger said.
The anthropoids we see in Asia now, such as gibbons and orangutans, "immigrated from Africa some 20 million years ago," Jaeger said.
Talk about illegal immigrants
- 34 million years ago they migrated from Asia to Africa - no-one knows how. And the ones left behind died out?
- 20 million years ago - they finally got fed up and immigrated back to Asia.
