The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey: Unearthing the Origins of Monkeys, Apes, and Humans

7. Initial Hints from Deep Time

7 Initial Hints from Deep Time Fertile fields and hillside vineyards whiz past the window in our compartment on the southbound TGV, the French version of a bullet train. My wife, Sandi, parcels out the food we’ve taken on board for lunch. Adhering to that well-worn maxim about “when in Rome,” we share a freshly baked baguette, some fruit, and a rich assortment of cheeses. Sandi looks out at the passing scenery, seemingly oblivious to the blistering speed we’ve managed to achieve. She has seen this all before, having undertaken several archeological field seasons investigating how Paleolithic humans hunted Ice Age horses in France. It’s a brand-new experience for me, though, and I marvel at our rapid progress through the Paris Basin toward our destination of Montpellier on the Mediterranean coast. Our trip entails both business and pleasure. It is late in the spring of 1991, and we have just enough time to fit this excursion into our schedules before embarking on our summer field seasons. Afterward, I shall return to the Wind River Basin, but Sandi will stay in Europe to work on a new archeological project in Cyprus. Here in France, we plan to visit Marc Godinot, one of Europe’s leading researchers on Eocene primates , who is perhaps best known for his work on Adapis (see chapter 2). Marc is an old friend in addition to being a valued colleague. We met for the first time at a scientific conference in Germany in 1985. A year 167 or so later, Marc obtained a postdoctoral fellowship through NATO to study fossil primates at Johns Hopkins, in the same lab where I was conducting my doctoral dissertation research. Our similar interests in Eocene primates led to several collaborative publications, and we have kept in touch ever since. Knowing that my recent work on Shoshonius would benefit from detailed comparisons with one of its European cousins, Marc invited me to come over to have a look at several skulls of Necrolemur in his lab at the Institut des Sciences de l’Evolution at the Université de Montpellier. In addition to the opportunity to compare Shoshonius with Necrolemur side by side, Marc has generously offered us the use of his family’s vacation house, located in the small resort town of Banyuls-surMer , the last French outpost on the Mediterranean coast north of the Spanish border. When our train pulls into the station in Montpellier, Marc is there to greet us. We exchange the usual pleasantries, but I can tell that Marc has something important to relate. Soon enough, our conversation veers from personal anecdotes about friends and family to the topic that has obviously been foremost in Marc’s mind. He mentions that he has some small primate teeth from an Eocene site in Algeria that he wants to show me back in his lab. Since my purpose in coming to France is not to study isolated teeth but to examine complete skulls of Necrolemur, I know that these specimens must be special in some way. “What do you think they are?” I ask. Marc’s excitement momentarily overwhelms his naturally conservative disposition as a scientist. “They seem to be tiny but remarkably advanced anthropoids!” he blurts out. “Really? How old are they?” “Middle Eocene at least, maybe older.” It takes a few moments before I fully grasp the significance of Marc’s words. Less than a year previously, my Wind River Basin colleagues and I had achieved no small measure of scientific notoriety by positing that anthropoids originated fifteen million years or so before their first appearance in the fossil record. Our claim was based on Shoshonius being a close fossil relative of living tarsiers, an interpretation that most paleontologists regarded as eminently reasonable. Still, many experts disliked the concept of a ghost lineage of early anthropoids that persisted for millions of years without leaving behind hard evidence in the fossil record. If Marc’s fossils held up under scrutiny, our prediction about the great antiquity of the anthropoid lineage would be vindicated. At the same time, our ghost lineage could move beyond its status as a purely theoretical construct. Even a few isolated teeth might transform our ghost lineage into something more tangible, something at least partly corpo168 INITIAL HINTS FROM DEEP TIME real. I insist that we go immediately to Marc’s lab to have a...