Latest News

St Hugh’s Tutorial Fellow in Human Sciences challenges view about the origin of primates

St Hugh’s Tutorial Fellow in Human Sciences, Professor Thomas Puschel, recently published a paper in the prestigious journal PNAS which challenges the long-held view that primates originated in warm tropical forests. Using fossil data and statistical modelling, Professor Puschel and the research team reconstructed ancient environments and found the first primates most likely lived in North America, in cold climates with hot summers and freezing winters and were far more adaptable than previously thought. The work, conducted in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Reading and the Max Planck Institute, is currently ranked in the top 5% of all research outputs.

Professor Puschel said, ‘We’ve long assumed that primates evolved in tropical forests because that’s where most of them live today. But the fossil and climate evidence tells a different story — early primates were more adaptable than we thought, and they likely evolved in much colder, more seasonal environments. By combining fossil data with climate reconstructions and statistical modelling, we were able to trace where primates’ ancestors actually lived — and it wasn’t the tropics. That’s exciting because it opens up entirely new ways of thinking about how primates first evolved and spread across the globe.’

For more information please about the paper click here.