The hunt for the dawn monkey: Unearthing the origins of monkeys, apes and humans

Chris K. Beard (2004)

University of California Press ISBN: 0520233697 (paperback) £17.95

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For both the general public at large and for many of us working with living primates, the most readily accessible mental images of ancestral primates are those of our anthropoid ancestors, a mental amalgam of long names, pliable family trees, missing links, remarkable extrapolations from tiny fossil fragments, low brows, high technology, and academic debates so vigorous they sometimes merge into applied character assassination. With paleoanthropology dominated by all the high-profile, headline-grabbing, questing for our nearest ancestors, it is easy to forget that other lineages too have their fossils, academic fields and their own fascinations.

Chris Beard’s The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey: unearthing the origins of monkeys, apes and humans is, at its heart, an exploration of one such lineage. But it is one that existed way before Australopithecus, Zinjanthropus and other fossil hominids began their progressively bipedal trudgings across the Pliocene and Pleistocene landscapes. Indeed, the subject of Beard’s book lived before any of the current lineages of extant primates began their adaptive radiations: for Beard’s fascination lies with the very origins of the Order Primates itself, their natural history, environment, ecology and, perhaps most fascinating of all, the time and place of its origin.

Beard takes us back to the Eocene of China, some 45 mybp, a time of great evolutionary radiation amongst mammals and, he would have it, amongst the primates. The evidence for his claim is a series of fossil primates that includes Eosimias sinensis (the ‘Dawn Monkey from China’), whose 1994 discovery (along with 4 clearly prosimian fossil species) in an industrial limestone quarry near Shanghai challenged the long-held notion, buttressed by 33.5 mybp Catopithecus from the Fayum deposits in Egypt, that the higher primate sub-order had first evolved in Africa. The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey covers the initial discovery, the skepticism with which it was greeted (some said the jaw was from an Eocene hedgehog), the subsequent accumulation of new fossils and the reinterpretation of long-sidelined material from Pondaung, Burma. Subsequent discoveries by French and Japanese as widely considered to have vindicated Beard’s stance.

Beard uses the first of The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey’s 11 chapters to layout and summarise the fossil and academic scenes before spending the next three in the Africa and North America, exploring the traditional notions of primate origins as well as providing a fine overview of their history of the discovery of paleoprimate fossils. Having set the scene, explored the anatomy, introduced the dramatis personae (of both academic and fossil primates), and confirmed the timelines in Chapter 5, Beard moves in Chapter 6 from consolidation to introductory iconoclasticism: the discovery in China of primate fossils some 10 million years older than any previously known, and some 20 million older than any previous Asian specimens. Touching several times on the idea of the tarsier origin of primates, Chapters 7 through 9 deal with the progressive accumulation of the Asian discoveries and with various interpretations given to them by Beard and his colleagues and by those from other academic camps. Chapter 10 provides a biogeographical and evolutionary scenario in the light of new discoveries, one that integrates the recent discoveries of African Eocene Algeripithecus and deals with the apparent cladistic disparities. Chapter 11 focusses on how fate of the new discoveries mirror the interpretation wars that have beset the study of human origins. The text is exhaustively and, as far as I could tell, faultlessly referenced, with none of those irritating instances where a fact is a) fascinating and b) not backed-up by a citation.

In the process we are introduced to the world of primate proto-history where river basin-by-basin speciation in what is now Wyoming had once made North America a hotspot of primate diversity. There are bushbaby-like microchoerids in Europe, and primitive anthropoids in the lush forests of what is now the Sahara. Mark Klinger’s artwork brings alive the primate communities of the times, putting flesh and fur on, among others, the lemur-like Notharcus, the galago look-a-like Shoshonius, the strange stub-tailed Adapis and the marmoset-like Eosimias. These fine paleoclimatically and paleobotanically accurate illustrations appear almost snapshot-like, Such syntheses, whether visual or in the written word, are the culmination of hours of work by others, a painstaking piecing together of meta-data, data points and opinions. One of the great strengths of Beard’s book it that it gives you an insight into exactly how such processes occur, revealing in both how knowledge is garnered and in its interpretation, the vital role of both serendipity and the networking assistance of colleagues. In this way it becomes a fine overview of the practice of science, about the thrill of the chase, the pragmatism of finding funding and academic positions, the polarizations of opinions and how intransigence, ego and careerism can lead to entrenched positions and skew subsequent interpretations of fossil data in ways that that have more to do with personal vindication than the pursuit of truth in all its forms (leaving you in no doubt that the study of human origins is far from unique in this regard).

To do this effectively, Beard had to explain a very great deal about primate anatomy, dealing with both functional morphology of anklebones and the minutiae of molar cusp terminology. That he does this, and does it so well that it falls nearly seamlessly into the narrative is a great tribute to his knowledge of the subject, his teaching expertise and his skill as a writer. Anything that has you getting excited about molar lophs and mentally going “Ah, yes, so the lateral pterygoid lamina of Shoshonius envelopes the auditory bulla… so it can’t have been a anthropoid!” in a spirit of enthusiastic revelation – rather than smugly congratulatory nerdiness – is a book that should not only find its way into course reading lists for its treatment of the subject, but may be safely passed on to interested adolescent nieces and nephews as a hopeful substitute for the X-Box.

Adrian A. Barnett,

Roehampton University.