Early primates survived in cold, not tropical climates
Japanese snow macaque - unusual for a modern primate but our common ancestor may have lived in a similar climate.
New research, led by Dr Jorge Avaria-Llautureo of the University of Reading, UK, suggests that our early ancestors evolved in a cold climate rather than the tropical environment traditionally assumed.
Ever-hopeful creationists will no doubt seize on this as evidence that science keeps “getting everything wrong” and is now supposedly admitting that humans did not evolve in Africa but… somewhere else. (Not in Mesopotamia either, and certainly not just 10,000 years ago, but we can worry about that later — the important thing is that science got it wrong again, right?).
But of course, this is a distortion. The new findings don’t overturn evolution, nor do they suggest humans suddenly popped up in the “wrong” place. The study doesn’t even concern early
human ancestors directly. Instead, it examines the very earliest primates — the common ancestor of the entire primate clade, which includes monkeys, apes, and humans, but also tree shrews, tarsiers, bush babies, and lemurs.
So the debate here isn’t about
whether primates share a common ancestor — that fact is firmly established — but about
where that ancestor first evolved. The conventional view has long been that primates arose in warm, tropical forests, because that’s where the majority of them live today. But by examining genetic data, ecological modelling, and the fossil record, Avaria-Llautureo and colleagues argue that the earliest primates actually adapted to cooler conditions. In other words, the roots of the primate family tree may lie in temperate regions, not the tropics.
Far from being a “crisis for evolution”, this is science doing what it always does: refining our understanding in light of new evidence. No biologist doubts that primates, including humans, share common ancestry going back tens of millions of years — far beyond the Bible’s compressed and mythical 6,000–10,000-year timeline. What changes is our picture of the environment in which those ancestors thrived.
As Dr Jason Gilchrist of Edinburgh Napier University — who was not involved in the study — points out in
his article in The Conversation, this research challenges old assumptions but also enriches our understanding of primate resilience. If our lineage began in colder settings, it helps explain how primates could later spread and diversify into such a wide range of habitats, from the tropics to the highlands, deserts, and even urban environments where some species now live.
So the take-home message is not “science was wrong again” but rather “science is working as it should”. Each new finding gives us a sharper, more accurate picture of our evolutionary story — a story that remains completely at odds with creationist myth-making, but endlessly fascinating in its complexity.
.jpg)
