paleo-Primate Project Gorongosa
Gorongosa National Park is an auspicious site within which to investigate primate evolution, both past and present, and uncover missing pieces in the puzzle of human origins. Lying at a strategic location representing the last unstudied link in the great African Rift that runs across eastern Africa, wherein lie the “cradles of humankind”, Gorongosa bears new fossil sites and provides astounding ecological diversity as a setting within which to study extant and fossil primates. Through adopting a uniquely interdisciplinary approach, the Paleo-Primate Project seeks to shed light on the origins and evolutionary success of the human lineage. This is the first project in human evolution where primatologists, palaeontologists, geologists, archaeologists, and ecologists work daily side-by-side, collecting data that converge on an overarching goal.
The Paleo-Primate Project is led by Dr Susana Carvalho who works for the Department of Scientific Services as the Director for Paleoanthropology and Primatology at Gorongosa National Park and is a Researcher Coordinator at ICArEHB (Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and the Evolution of Human Behaviour), coordinating the Primate Models for Hominin Evolution research theme. Dr Carvalho is also an affiliate Researcher at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, and in Gorongosa she is leading an international, interdisciplinary team of over 30 distinguished scholars from the fields of geology, speleology, palaeontology, palaeobotany, archaeology, primatology, genetics, and conservation biology, representing institutions from 14 countries and 5 continents.
Dr Carvalho and her team have identified multiple promising fossil sites in Gorongosa National Park and embarked on what could be a multi-decade exploration and research endeavour which aims to yield new insights about when and how our earliest human ancestors evolved in Africa, the environments which they inhabited and traversed, and the fauna and flora which they interacted with and evolved alongside. Following investigations involving extensive surveys and the use of new approaches in the search of paleontological sites, the team have discovered new fossil sites in Gorongosa National Park and unearthed the first Miocene fossils from coastal woodlands in the southern East African Rift. The Miocene epoch extends from approximately 23.03 to 5.33 million years ago—a key time in the evolution of African ecosystems which witnessed the origin of the African apes. The Miocene fossil sites described so far in Gorongosa have yielded an exceptional assemblage of marine and terrestrial fossil species, pointing to a unique combination of fauna and flora known at no other sites along the East African Rift System. These discoveries and continued excavations and investigations by the team are opening an entirely new vista on a region of Africa that, until recently, had remained paleontologically unknown and which holds great potential for uncovering evidence of the last common ancestor of humans and African apes, and increasing our understanding of the evolution of African mammals more broadly.
