Hominoid 

Hominoid is the old money. Proconsul is one of the best represented, most abundant, and successful hominoid fossils of the Early Miocene. It lived from about 23 to 14 million years ago. It was discovered by Louis Leakey and A.T. Hopwood in the 1930s at Rusinga Island in Lake Victoria, Africa. Later finds of this type of fossils were found in Western Kenya along the shores of Lake Victoria and in Uganda. Hopwood found similarity between these fossils and the living apes and he named it as Proconsul, after Consul, an ape then present in a London zoo. It is included in the hominoid group because it shows few features of living apes and Old World monkeys.  

Proconsuls lived in Africa and represent three species, namely P. africanus, P. nyanzae, and P. major. The first one is the smallest and the least known and the third one is the largest and the best known. They vary in size. Some were of the size of a monkey and some of the size of a chimpanzee. Their teeth had thin layer of enamel which is suggestive of the fact that they were fruit and leaves eater. Their lower molar teeth also showed 5-y pattern of cusps. The size of the brain was greater than that of the Old World monkeys. They had no tail and had smaller snout, and their eyes looked more forward. The post-cranial skeleton was more monkey-like. The forelimbs were shorter than the hind limbs, hence they moved through the trees like monkeys. Brachiation as a mode of locomotion, a characteristic of the apes, was not developed in them. It is also found that by the Late Miocene (10-5 mya), the age of the apes came to an end and monkeys became more common in the Old World. The forest retreated because of the climatic changes and most apes were confined to the rain forest areas, mainly in West Africa and Southeast Asia. Monkeys survived because they could process (chew) leaves effectively. Certain anthropologists believe that Proconsuls might have been ancestor to the living African apes and also probably to the Old World monkeys.

Questionnaire:

• Explain more about the Hominoid fossils?