THE original great ape has been discovered. And unlike its modern relatives, the chimp and orang-utan, it couldn’t swing through trees.
Salvador Moyà-Solà and colleagues at the Miquel Crusafont Institute of Palaeontology in Barcelona, Spain, unearthed a fossilised skull and partial skeleton of Pierolapithecus catalaunicus (see below) in rock sediment near the city. The ape lived during the Middle Miocene period, between 13 and 12.5 million years ago, during the time when the great apes, which today include chimpanzees, gorillas and humans, split from lesser apes, including gibbons and siamangs. Until the discovery of Pierolapithecus, there has been hardly any…
