Anthropological and Paleontological Research at the Fossil Primate Sites of the Fayum, Egypt

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

The researchers in this project will conduct three field seasons in Egypt with subsequent studies on recovered fossils to be carried out at Duke and cooperating laboratories. The objective is to learn more about the earliest forerunners of monkeys, apes and humans. Previous discoveries have made this the world's most important location for such research. During the projected seasons, sites in the Fayum region will yield skulls, jaws, and skeletal parts from many early primates of both Eocene and Oligocene age. These date between about 36 and 26 million years old. Fossils come from a dozen quarries and are seldom recovered as associated skeletons, so that great diligence over long periods of time is required to add knowledge by finding previously unknown and often unassociated limb bones and skulls of the more than twenty extinct primate species that occur there. Most of these are represented only by parts of upper and lower jaws and, hence, much remains to be discovered. Africa appears to be the continent where the group of monkeys, apes and humans experienced most of its history and the Fayum holds the only continuous sequence of deposits in Africa during the early part of the time concerned.