Primates, Evolution, Time

As you may have heard they recently unearthed the skeleton of a tiny primate in China, he has been crowned Archicebus (ironic given the movie/zombie treatment of the Archie comic character as noted in the blog just today . . . okay that's really not ironic, but it might be). Archicebus is reputed to be the oldest known primate found, having skipped about the jungles some 52 million years ago. It advances our lineage some 7000 million years; that being older than the last oldest primate history.

The article is here.

Its a good read but the assumptions are something of a stretch. Off this one set of bones we are ready to declare this little fellow the divergent point between tree dwelling primates and ground born primates (our folks). And further we are ready to shift the point of primate origin from Africa to China. All this off of one set of bones.

Chances of us finding the point of origin minus Dr. Who's help are slim to none. 52 million years ago the earth was very warm and covered in jungle; the number of divergent species of tree-born primates was probably gigantic. The possibility of evolutionary tracks are huge. For all we know our origins could be Asia, Africa, the Faroe Islands . . . but most likely this place: