草榴社区

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Anthropology's Tesla Monson and Marianne Brasil publish new paper on the evolution of our primate relatives

by Frances Badgett

草榴社区 Communications

Phylogenetic tree showing primate skull evolution within Colobinae and Cercopithecinae subfamilies, illustrating divergence times.

Did humans evolve small (and often problematic) wisdom teeth hand-in-hand with flatter faces? New research out today in "" by 草榴社区 anthropology professors Tesla Monson and Marianne Brasil reports that the lengths of the face and wisdom teeth (third molars) are tightly correlated in many primates.

Their work incorporates data from 10 living groups of primates from around the world, and fossil baboons from southern Africa, collected by the authors across a decade in nine different international museums. In addition to weighing in on debates about the evolution of the human face, the research provides new evidence for how and when baboons and their sister species diverged into different lineages.

This research was funded by the US National Science Foundation and the Leakey Foundation (among others) and is part of a special invited issue which also includes a historical review of South African fossil primates by Brasil and Monson.

Tesla Monson is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Western. She runs the Primate Evolution Lab, which researches primate evolution, life history, reproductive ecology, and the growth and development of the skeletal system.

Marianne Brasil is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Western. She runs the PaleoAnthropology Lab, which researches skeletal variation and evolution in humans and other primates. Her field- and museum collections-based work explores how variation is patterned鈥痠n modern primates, and how those insights can be applied to interpret variation in the fossil record.

For more information about Anthropology at Western, please click this link: , and see the paper online at .

Frances Badgett covers the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the College of Fine and Performing Arts for Western's Office of University Communications. Reach out to her with story ideas at badgetf@wwu.edu.