Corbin Rainbolt News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Two new studies suggest that 21 million years ago African primates frequented edge habitat and fed on leaves

Because the timing of the assembly of Africa’s grassland habitats underlies many evolutionary hypotheses, our discovery that they existed much earlier than expected calls for a recalibration of those ideas.

Anthropologists have long thought that our ape ancestors evolved an upright torso in order to pick fruit in forests, but new research from the University of Michigan suggests a life in open woodlands and a diet that included leaves drove apes' upright stature.

This may have driven the evolution of upright apes

Evidence of an early savannah grass growing millions of years earlier than previously known may fundamentally change the understanding of life in the prehistoric world. A pair of studies funded by the National Science Foundation and published in the journal Science document the earliest evidence for locally abundant open-habitat grasses in eastern Africa and how those environments likely influenced early ape evolution.