NEW EVIDENCES ON THE ANCESTRY OF THE HUMA NKIND

The hominoid Primates were first recogni sed in the early Miocene laye rs of the African rift-valley in Eastern Africa. The genus Proconsul i s a goad ancestral morphotype for all the superfamily. Proconsul was a generalized arboreal ape without any specialisations of the recent ap es. It is the starting point of an important radiation into the Early and Middle Miocene of Africa. During the Middle Miocene the African co ntinent came into contact with the Eurasian plate through the Arabian plate and a land way was opened between the two continents and some fa unal migrations occured at that time. Some lineages of hominoid Primat es went to Europe and Asia. One of them, Sivapithecus, was found in As ia, particularly in late Miocene deposits of the Siwalik hills; it sha res derived characters with the recent Pongo and, in spite of some pec uliar features, can be placed in the same clade which is the Pongidae family. Another one was found in Northern Greece and it belongs to the genus Ouranopithecus. The study of several teeth and jaws showed that it shares derived characters with the australopithecines and must be classified with the hominids. The recent discovery of a large part of a face corroborates that Ouranopithecus is very far from Sivapithecus. A supra-orbital torus is present but not projecting like those of the African apes; the orbits is large; the nasal aperture is broad and th e sides converge slightly toward the nasal bones which an flattened an d narrowed at their proximal side. The skull of Ouranopithecus differs from those of the other Miocene apes (Sivapithecus, Lufengpithecus or Dryopithecus) and it fits better with Australopithecus afarensis. We consider the Macedonian species as the fore-runner of the Plio-pleisto cene hominids.