The Ape Family Tree Had a Blank Spot. Two Jawbones Landed in It.

Early ape fossils pile up in East Africa. Later ones appear across Eurasia. Between them was a conspicuous blank spot stretching across northern Africa and the route apes would eventually take out of the continent.

Paleontologists went looking inside that gap. They found two pieces of jaw.

In 2024, a team working in Wadi Moghra in northern Egypt recovered fossil fragments belonging to a previously unknown extinct ape, now named Masripithecus moghraensis. The animal lived about 17 million years ago and was described in a study published in March 2026 in Science.

The team had spent years searching Wadi Moghra specifically because North Africa might hold a missing part of early ape evolution. Monkey fossils had been found there before. Ape fossils had not.

Researchers combined anatomical details from the fossils with genetic data from living apes to place Masripithecus on the evolutionary tree. The new species appears very close to the lineage leading to the last common ancestor of all living apes, including gibbons, gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans and humans.

That matters because most known early ape fossils come from East Africa. Masripithecus does not prove modern apes originated in North Africa, but it points to the East African concentration possibly reflecting gaps in the fossil record rather than the true center of ape origins. A related commentary in the same journal argued the discovery reopens the question of where the search for humanity's ape ancestors should even be centered.

Two fragments of jaw do not redraw the whole map. They do make the blank space harder to ignore.

Read the full story at Smithsonian Magazine, March 30, 2026

Hot Take: The fossil record has an unfortunate habit of turning absence of evidence into geography. Two jaw fragments remind paleontology that blank spaces on a map are not the same thing as empty ecosystems.