Proconsulidae

Proconsulidae is an early family of primates that lived during the Miocene epoch in Kenya, and was restricted to Africa. Members of the family have a mixture of Old World monkey and ape characteristics, so the placement in the ape superfamily Hominoidea is tentative; some scientists place Proconsulidae outside of Hominoidea in a separately superfamily Proconsuloidea, before the split of the apes and Old World monkeys.

Discovery and classification

The first specimen, a partial jaw discovered in 1909 by a gold prospector at Koru, near Kisumu in western Kenya, was also the oldest fossil hominoid known until recently, and the first fossil mammal ever found in sub-Saharan Africa. The name, ''Proconsul'', was devised by in 1933 and means "before Consul"; the name of a famous captive chimp in London. At the time Consul was being used as a circus name for performing chimpanzees. The Folies Bergère of 1903 in Paris had a popular performing chimpanzee named Consul, and so did the Belle Vue Zoo in Manchester, England, in 1894. On the latter's death in that year Ben Brierley wrote a commemorative poem wondering where the " Missing Link" between chimpanzees and men was.

Hopwood in 1931 had discovered the fossils of three individuals while expeditioning with Louis Leakey in the vicinity of Lake Victoria. The Consul that he selected to use in the name was neither of the ones mentioned above, but another located in the London Zoo. Consul is being used Linnaean-style to symbolize the chimpanzee. ''Proconsul'' is therefore "ancestral to the Chimpanzee" in Hopwood's words. He also added ''africanus'' as the species name.

Other fossils discovered later were initially classified as ''africanus'' and subsequently reclassified; that is, the total pool of fossils originally considered ''africanus'' was "split" and the fragments "lumped" with other finds to create a new species. For example, Mary Leakey's famous find of 1948 began as ''africanus'' and was split from it to be lumped with Thomas Whitworth's finds of 1951 as ''heseloni'' by Alan Walker in 1993.

The family of Proconsulidae was first proposed by Louis Leakey, eleven years after he and Wilfrid Le Gros Clark had defined ''africanus'', ''nyanzae'' and ''major''. It was not immediately accepted but ultimately prevailed.

The history of hominoid classification in the second half of the 20th century is sufficiently complex to warrant a few books itself. Most of the palaeoanthropologists have changed their minds at least once as new fossils have come to light and new observations have made, and will probably continue to do so. The classifications found in the literature of one decade are not generally the same as those of another. For example, in 1987 Peter Andrews and Lawrence Martin, established palaeontologists, took the point of view that ''Proconsul'' is not a hominoid, but is a sister taxon to it.

Taxonomy

*Proconsuloidea or Hominoidea
**Proconsulidae Leakey, 1963
*** Proconsulinae Leakey, 1963
**** ''Proconsul'' , 1933
***** '' Proconsul africanus'' , 1933
***** '' Proconsul gitongai'' (Pickford & Kunimatsu, 2005)
***** '' Proconsul major'' Le Gros Clark & Leakey, 1950
***** '' Proconsul meswar'' & , 2009

Formerly considered as a subfamily of proconsulids, it is now thought that the Nyanzapithecinae are instead related to the Dendropithecidae, a basal ape clade.

Notes

References

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Proconsulidae

Prehistoric apes
Miocene primates of Africa
†Proconsulidae
Miocene first appearances
Miocene extinctions
Prehistoric mammal families