Evolutionary origins of the great apes

The course will take you back to a time before modern humans existed, when apes ruled the primate world. To date, we have identified as many as 40 groups of fossil apes from the ancient Miocene period (22 - 5.5 million years ago). This is 8 times the number that survive today. This wide diversity seems to have characterised the ape family from the outset - almost as soon as apes appear in the fossil record, there are lots of different species. But what happened to the ape species that died out and why did other apes survive to modern times? Where did they come from and evolve? - was it in Africa or Eurasia? In this course, we will focus on the ancestral forms of modern apes - from their anatomy, the environment they lived in and their evolutionary journey.