PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, OCTOBER 2015
All the earliest fossil members of the human family, and our closest living relatives, gorillas and chimpanzees, are exclusively African. Given this fact, biologists since the time of Charles Darwin have accepted that the African ape and its subfamily the hominines, a group that comprises gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans, evolved in Africa. This conclusion was seemingly confirmed more than 50 years after Darwin’s assumption by the discovery of the earliest ancestors of humans in Africa. My research on the fossil record of ape evolution reaches another conclusion: the hominines began to evolve in Europe, not Africa.
In my latest book, The Real Planet of the Apes: A New Story of Human Origins, I provide concrete evidence for this hypothesis and show how a broader consideration ...
