The Graecopithecus is of interest for several reasons, one, is that its foot prints showing a bipedal walking position were dated to 6.15 million years ago (Ma), the second is that they were found on Crete, an island that at that time was isolated in the eastern Mediterranean, and was never in contact with Africa, and finally, its age places it outside of Africa, as the oldest member of the hominin family! Let's look at each of these points.
Graecopyhtecus
As we will see below, there are several fossil remains and strong evidence suggesting that the Hominidae, a group that embraces all of the great apes, and the Homininae, the group that includes all African great apes, the Australopithecus species, and the genus Homo, originated in the Balkans region of Europe, and Western Asia, in Anatolia, Turkey, and the Caucasus.
These Eurasian ancestors lived before the split between the branches that lead to gorillas, chmipancees, australopithecus, and homo (our lineage).
Spassov et al., (2012) reported a premolar belonging to a hominid that was found in a quarry in Azmaka, Bulgaria, Europe. It was dated at around 7 Ma. Though it is a pre-human hominid, it was not alone. The paper mentions other similar hominids living in Europe, Anatolia and the Caucasus around that time.
The Ouranopithecus macedoniensis from the north of Geece and the Ankarapithecus meteai from Turkey are roughly 8.7 to 9.9 Ma. The Anatolian Ouranopithecus turkae is 7.5 yo 8.7 Ma. The Dryopithecus from Udabno (Georgia) is also coeval with these hominids.
Fuss et al., (2017) -with members of the Spassov study- classed the Bulgarian specimen as a member of the Graecopithecus group, and compared the teet with the original specimen of that group, found in Pyrgos Vassilissis, near Athens, in Greece during the final days of World War II. This specimen is now known as Graecopithecus freybergi. They were given an age ranging from 7.175 Ma to 7.24 Ma. They found that they teeth are different from those of the Ouranopithecus and have features that "point to a possible phylogenetic affinity with hominin... and therefore, provides intriguing evidence of what could be the oldest known hominin."
Remarkably, these Miocene primates were living in the Balkan-Anatolian region, far from Africa, the purported homeland of hominins. And this is a surprising find!
In Africa there are two primates with a similar age, the Orrorin tugenensis, discovered in 2001 in Tugen, Kenya and dated to 5.8 to 6.0 Ma, which appears to have an upright posture, and the Sahelanthropus tchadensis roughly 6-7 Ma. Note that Macchiarelli et al. (2020) suggested based on the shape of the leg-bone of the Sahelanthropus, that it "belongs to an individual that was not habitually bipedal."
Despite the presence of ancient African primates that could potentially be hominins, Fuss et al. confidently assert that "More fossils are needed but at this point it seems likely that the Eastern Mediterranean needs to be considered as just as likely a place of hominine diversification and hominin origins as tropical Africa."
The Fossil footprints in Crete
The prints discovered in Trachilos, close to Kissamos, on the nortwestern tip of Crete, Greece, were reported by Gierlinski, G. D. et al. in 2017 (Possible hominin footprints from the Late Miocene (C. 5.7 Ma) of Crete?. Proc. Geol. Assoc. 128, 697–710. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.Pgeola.2017.07.006), who noted that their shape suggested that "the trackmaker was a basal member of the clade Hominini." However, due to the distance separating the island of Crete from tropical Africa, the authors wonder if they belong to some "hitherto unknown late Miocene primate that convergently evolved human-like foot anatomy." Meaning that it was a primate that had prints similar to hominins, but, was not of our same lineage.
The tracks are clearly hominin, smaller than any known hominin tracks. Being 5.7 Ma, they are 2 million years older than the previously oldest hominin tracks.
A paper published in Nature by Uwe Kirscher et al., (2021) analyzed the age of the prints, and dated them with an age of approximately 6.05 Ma, which is 300,000 years older than the previous estimates.
Yet another paper published in 2017 by Böhme et al., is terminant regarding the hominin nature of the Graecopithecus:
"Graecopithecus predates by several hundred thousand years the next youngest candidate hominin Sahelanthropus, which occupied the southern Saharan tropics after its earliest Messinian desertification. Given the potential hominin affinity of Graecopithecus, our results suggest that the Pan-Homo split predated the Messinian and that the chimpanzee–human last common ancestor thrived in the Mediterranean region. The emerging Saharan and Arabian desert belt thereby possibly acted as a vicariant agent [this means the desert was a barrier between species]. Our conclusions support views that major Miocene hominid radiations occurred outside Africa and
endorse the hypothesis that the hominin clade arose in the Eastern Mediterranean ."
Yet the pro-African origin scholars don't like this at all! A 2017 paper published in South Africa goes overboard trying to refute the hominin nature of the Eurasian hominin: "... Even if Graecopithecus can be attributed to Hominini, the fact that it is older than Sahelanthropus does not make it the basal-most representative of this clade... the evolutionary root of humankind would definitely remain in Africa... This means that the phylogenetic relationship between Graecopithecus and Hominini is as yet not confirmed."
Finally, we should also note that this period was one of great changes in the Mediterranean basin. The closure of the Strait of Gibralter led to the evaporation of the Mediterranean, which impacted on the climate, around 5.5 Ma. The Sahara also became a desert. Then, the Atlantic Ocean breached Gibraltar during the Zanclean flood, that refilled the Mediterranean basin.
How did it reach Crete? (Walking)
Crete was splitting from the Balkans' mainland due to a fault that created the Aegean Sea. Many mammals like pigs, deer, a horse species, a bovid, hyaenids, proboscideans reached what is now Crete by land, before it split some 5 Ma. This implies that the individual who made the tracks in Trachilos walked along a peninsula linking Greece with Crete. However, there never was any land bridges at that time, linking Crete with Africa. We can ignore a possible African origin for this individual.
Recent Publications on this subject
More recent findings, Ayla Sevim-Erol et al., (2023) reports a new ape-genus, Anadoluvius, dated at 8.7 Ma, which was discovered in Anatolia, Turkey. The paper places the Balkanic-Anatolian speciments in "at least three hominine genera, Ouranopithecus, Graecopithecus, and Anadoluvius" it finds that they probably evolved from older European hominines. The authors don't support the idea that they evolved from African hominines that dispersed into Europe because there is no evidence of any ancestral lineages in Africa 10 to 13 Ma, and because their analysis does not support it.
The effect on Human Evolution
Another recent paper by Mansfield and Vaneechoutte (2024) proposes a new hypothesis about the split between Pan (chimpancees), Gorillas, and Homo, that had their last common ancestor outside of Africa, in the Europe-Anatolian region. They argue that the dissecation of the Mediterranean forced the "separate branches of European hominids to migrate out of the Mediterranean region. We argue that the lineages leading to Gorilla and Pan independently migrated into Africa, while the lineage leading to Homo went in another direction. Thereafter, the Zanclean Megaflood (5.3 Ma) — hich caused the Mediterranean to refill very quickly— may have cut off the migration route between Eurasia and Africa at the Sinai Peninsula, isolating a small population (the putative Homo lineage) on the Arabian Peninsula / Red Sea coast during a period of hyperaridity. The other group (Pan lineage) crossed into Africa, where it subsequently diversified into various species of Australopithecus."
The authors also suggest that there could have been "multiple migrations of different hominid species from Europe to Africa between 10.0–6.0 Ma, giving rise to various orthograde, evidently bipedal genera in Africa such as Sahelanthropus, Orrorin, Ardipithecus and Australo-pithecus." But those that migrated during the arid period of Mediterranean dissecation were blocked out of Africa by the vast Zanclean flood, that in two years filled up the Mediterranean. This paper suggests that "So great was the impact of the Zanclean flood, 5.33 Ma, that the waters of the Mediterranean might have mingled with those of the Red Sea, submerging the land bridge between the Arabian and African plates, thereby cutting off the migratory route into Africa and potentially flooding the Ethiopian Afar Danakil depression of the Middle Awash region..." Then chimps split from our ancestral lineage 5-6 Ma and entered Africa while the Homo lineage remained isolated in Westerm Asia!
"the putative Homo lineage remaining isolated from all other Hominini for a long period (possibly the entire Pliocene) in a relatively small region, and this would explain the absence of PtERV1 genetic elements in our genome, and many of the aberrant features unique to our genus. Then, approximately ~1.8–1.6 Ma, there is the first indisputable evidence of our genus Homo, radically different from small-brained, short-legged australopithecines or habilines in Africa. Fossils of H. erectus (s.l.) appear more or less synchronously in locations as far apart as eastern China and southern Africa. The Pan lineage, on the other hand, did not become isolated and thus was able to further expand and diverge within the African continent as various lineages of the more robust bipedal hominids, such as South African A. africanus, A. sediba, and Paranthropus robustus, all of which possess numerous characters that align with extant chimpanzees / bonobo."
The Homo erectus that originated in the Arabian Peninsula then moved into Africa, to Georgia, and East, to China, and Indonesia: "If the original members of our genus Homo had been cut off from the rest of the world in the Red Sea coastal zone during the Pliocene, the drop in sea-levels in the early Pleistocene, ~2.6 Ma, would have opened up coastal or fluvial migration routes in several directions all at once; places where evidence of early Homo appears: west into Africa (Nariokotome, Koobi Fora), north into Georgia (Dmanisi), east into Indonesia (Java) and China (Yuanmou)."
I will look into another paper that supports this idea in my next post.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall ©
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