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Morphological Evidence for Primate Origins and Supraordinal Relationships

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Abstract

There are five major scenarios that have been advanced to account for the early events in the origination of the order Primates: a transition from terrestriality to arboreality, the adoption of a grasp-leaping mode of locomotion, the evolution of features for visual predation, an adaptation to terminal branch feeding occurring during angiosperm diversification, or a combination involving terminal branch feeding followed by visual predation. These hypotheses are assessed using both neontological and fossil data. Of the five scenarios, the angiosperm diversification hypothesis is not contradicted by modern data and is found to be the most consistent with the fossil record. In particular, the evolution of features for manual grasping and dental processing of fruit in the earliest primates (primitive plesiadapiforms), and the subsequent development of features for better grasping and more intense frugivory in the common ancestor of Euprimates and Plesiadapoidea, is consistent with a close relationship between early primate and angiosperm evolution. All the other scenarios are less consistent with the pattern of trait acquisition through time observed in the fossil record. Consideration of non-euprimates (e.g., scandentians and plesiadapiforms) is found to be essential to viewing primate origins as a series of incremental steps rather than as an event.

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Acknowledgments

Our thanks to JG Fleagle, SGB Chester, PD Gingerich, KD Rose, FS Szalay, and AC Walker for conversations relevant to this chapter. We thank Annette Zitzmann for providing the photo of Ptilocercus in Fig. 11. Research was funded by grants from Wenner Gren, the Paleobiological Fund, Sigma Xi, NSF (SBR-9815884), the University of Winnipeg, and NSERC to MTS; NSF (BCS-0129601) to G.F. Gunnell, P.D. Gingerich, and JIB; NSF (SBR-9616194), Field Museum of Natural History, Sigma Xi, and the Yale University Social Science Faculty Research Fund to EJS; 2002 NSFGRF, NSF DDIG (BCS-0622544), a Leakey Foundation Grant, and NSF (BCS-1317525) to DMB. A portion of this updated manuscript was written when JIB was supported as an Edward P. Bass Distinguished Visiting Environmental Scholar in the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies (YIBS).

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  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto Scarborough, 1265 Military Trail, M1C 1A4, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Prof. Mary T. Silcox

  2. Department of Anthropology, Yale University, P.O. Box 208277, New Haven, CT, 06520, USA

    Prof. Eric J. Sargis

  3. Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Dickinson Hall, Gainesville, FL, 32611-7800, USA

    Prof. Jonathan I. Bloch

  4. Biological Sciences Building, Duke University, Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, 130 Science Drive, Box 90383, Durham, NC, USA

    Prof. Doug M. Boyer

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Correspondence to Mary T. Silcox .

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  1. Inst. Anthropologie, Universität Mainz FB 10 (1050), Mainz, Germany

    Winfried Henke

  2. American Museum of Natural History Division of Anthropology, New York, New York, USA

    Ian Tattersall

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Silcox, M.T., Sargis, E.J., Bloch, J.I., Boyer, D.M. (2013). Morphological Evidence for Primate Origins and Supraordinal Relationships. In: Henke, W., Tattersall, I. (eds) Handbook of Paleoanthropology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27800-6_29-5

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