Did Apes Begin in the North?
AWhere did the apes come from? The question matters to more than a handful of specialists, because the living apes include not only gibbons, orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees but also ourselves. For decades, the prevailing view has been that early apes and their close relatives were concentrated further south in Africa, with East Africa often seen as the most likely birthplace of the group. It is worth remembering, however, that any account of where a group of animals first appeared is shaped by where its fossils happen to have been found. A map of discoveries is not necessarily a map of history.
BNorth Africa illustrates the problem well. Sites there dating from the Early Miocene, a period that began around 23 million years ago, have produced fossil monkeys, but until recently not a single definitive ape. It would be easy to conclude that apes were simply absent from the region. In my view, though, such a gap should be treated as a question rather than an answer, since a missing fossil may reflect nothing more than the places researchers have chosen to search.
CA discovery in Egypt now suggests that this caution was justified. Researchers from the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center, working with colleagues from the University of Southern California, spent five years looking for exactly this kind of fossil. During expeditions in 2023 and 2024 to Wadi Moghra, a well-known fossil site in northern Egypt, they finally found it. The new species, described in the journal Science in March 2026, has been named Masripithecus moghraensis. The first part of the name combines Masr, the Arabic word for Egypt, with pithekos, the Greek word for ape, while the second part honours the site itself. The animal lived around 17 to 18 million years ago, and it is the first definitive fossil ape ever recovered from North Africa.
DSo far, only parts of the lower jaw have been found. The jaw is sturdy and carries large canine and premolar teeth, while the molars have rounded, textured chewing surfaces. From these features, the team concluded that the animal mainly ate fruit but was also able to deal with harder foods such as nuts or seeds. This flexibility may have been important. At the time, a changing climate was making the seasons more pronounced across northern Africa and Arabia, so the food available would have varied considerably through the year. An ape that could switch to tougher foods when fruit was scarce would have been well equipped to cope.
EThe fossil's real significance, however, lies in where it sits on the family tree. The researchers used Bayesian analyses, a statistical approach that combined anatomical evidence, genetic data from living apes and the ages of fossils. These analyses placed Masripithecus closer to the living apes than any known Early Miocene ape from East Africa. A further biogeographic analysis, which estimates where ancestors are most likely to have lived, pointed to North Africa and the Middle East as the probable home of the common ancestor of all living apes, sometime between about 23 and 16 million years ago. Erik Seiffert of the University of Southern California admits that he had previously considered it probable that this ancestor lived in or around East Africa, but he says the new analyses strongly challenge that idea. The study's senior author, Hesham Sallam, puts it more simply: in his words, the early ape family tree has a missing piece, and North Africa holds it.
FThe geography of the time helps to make this scenario believable. The African and Arabian plates were moving slowly northwards towards Asia, gradually altering the connections between these landmasses. In addition, rising and falling sea levels periodically narrowed the stretches of water that separated them, making it easier at times for animals to travel between Africa and Eurasia. According to the researchers, Masripithecus suggests that apes were already diversifying in this region before new land connections allowed them to spread into Europe and Asia.
GNone of this means that the Egyptian jaw belonged to one of our direct ancestors, and the researchers are careful not to make that claim. They do not even argue that it was the direct ancestor of the living apes; rather, it offers clues about where the wider lineage may have begun. Because only part of the jaw is known, the animal's overall appearance, its body size, the way it moved and its behaviour all remain unclear. Seiffert himself notes that the likelihood of the North African scenario does not depend on Masripithecus, although the fossil is very much consistent with it. I would argue that this is the most important point in the whole study. A single jaw could never overturn decades of research by itself, but a statistical model that draws on many lines of evidence is far harder to dismiss.
HThe debate about the origins of later apes is still far from settled, and more fieldwork in North Africa and the Middle East will be needed before any firm conclusion can be reached. Nevertheless, the discovery carries a lesson that goes beyond apes. For years, the absence of fossils from one region was quietly taken as evidence that nothing important had happened there. Masripithecus is a reminder that scientists can only find what they look for, and that the story of our origins may depend as much on where we dig as on what the ground contains.