Saturday, March 28, 2026

Masripithecus: A new Miocene ape from Egypt sheds light on the origins of modern apes

A 17–18-million-year-old ape from Egypt suggests that the Middle East was a key center in early hominoid evolution

Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center (MUVP)

Masripithecus: A new Miocene ape from Egypt sheds light on the origins of modern apes — image:
Reconstruction of Masripithecus moghraensis by Mauricio Antón.
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Credit: Copyrights belong to Professor Hesham Sallam

In a study to be published in Science on [3/26/2026], an international research team from the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center (Egypt) and the University of Southern California (USA) describe Masripithecus moghraensis, a newly identified fossil ape that lived around 17–18 million years ago, during the Early Miocene. Recovered from the Wadi Moghra fossil site in northern Egypt, the remains represent the first definitive fossil ape known from North Africa. The finding not only extends the geographic range of early apes, but also places Egypt—and the wider Middle East region—at the heart of a pivotal evolutionary transition leading to modern apes.

Hesham Sallam, a paleontologist at Mansoura University, Egypt, and senior author of the study, said, “We spent five years searching for this kind of fossil because, when we look closely at the early ape family tree, it becomes clear that something is missing—and North Africa holds that missing piece.”

Previously, Early Miocene sites in North Africa had yielded fossils of monkeys, but not apes. As a result, early apes and their close relatives were thought to be confined largely to more southern parts of Africa during this period. Geologically younger ape fossils have been reported from Africa, Asia, and Europe, but their relationships and geographic roots are actively debated. Now it appears likely that this uneven fossil record obscured our understanding of the origin of crown Hominoidea—the group that includes all living apes, from gibbons and orangutans to gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans, along with their last common ancestor.

The discovery of Masripithecus not only reveals that apes were present in North Africa during this time period, but also that the new species was quite distinct from similar-aged species in East Africa. The genus name Masripithecus combines Masr (مصر), the Arabic word for Egypt, with the Greek píthēkos, meaning ape. The species name refers to Wadi Moghra, a well-known fossil locality in northern Egypt, where the remains were recovered during fieldwork by the Sallam Lab team in 2023 and 2024.

Although the new fossil material is limited to the lower jaw, it preserves a distinctive combination of features not seen in any other known ape from this time. These include exceptionally large canine and premolar teeth, molar teeth with rounded and heavily textured chewing surfaces, and a notably robust jaw. “Together, they suggest that Masripithecus was adapted for versatility. The study interprets its chewing anatomy as evidence of a flexible, mainly fruit-based diet, with the ability to process harder foods such as nuts or seeds when needed. This flexibility would have helped Masripithecus to thrive at a time when climatic changes were leading to more pronounced seasonality in northern Africa and Arabia,” said Shorouq Al-Ashqar, a researcher at the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center, Egypt who was a first author of the study.

Anatomy alone, however, is only part of the story. Masripithecus occupies a key position on the ape family tree. Using sophisticated Bayesian methods, the team combined anatomical evidence from living and extinct apes, DNA from living apes, and the geological ages of fossil species to determine how living and extinct species are related, and when they all split from each other. The researchers’ analysis found that Masripithecus is more closely related to the living apes than are any species known from the Early Miocene of East Africa.

Additional biogeographic analyses by the team point to northern Africa and the Middle East as the most likely home for the common ancestor of all living apes, which is estimated to have lived during the Early Miocene. During that time period, this region occupied a key position as the African and Arabian plates moved to the north during their final phase of collision with Asia. Shifting sea levels periodically reduced marine barriers, turning the region into a natural corridor for animal dispersal.

In this context, Masripithecus provides a crucial intermediate link between the previously disjunct African and Eurasian fossil records, revealing that apes were already diversifying in the area and therefore positioned to expand into Europe and Asia as soon as land connections were established.

Erik Seiffert, a paleontologist at the University of Southern California who was a co-author of the study, said that his perspective on ape origins has changed. “For my entire career, I considered it probable that the common ancestor of all living apes lived in or around East Africa. But this new discovery, and our new and novel analyses of hominoid phylogeny and biogeography, now strongly challenge that idea. And, importantly, the likelihood of this scenario doesn’t depend on Masripithecus -- but it is very much consistent with it.”

The researchers anticipate that renewed exploration in this region will uncover further fossils critical to understanding the origin and early diversification of modern apes. As Masripithecus moghraensis shows, key chapters of our evolutionary history may still lie hidden in regions that have yet to be fully explored.

Masripithecus: A new Miocene ape from Egypt sheds light on the origins of modern apes [VIDEO]

Masripithecus moghraensis mandibular fragment with right M3 at the moment of discovery.

Credit

copyrights belong to Professor Hesham Sallam

Sallam Lab team from Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center

Credit

copyrights belong to Professor Hesham Sallam

Masripithecus: A new Miocene ape from Egypt sheds light on the origins of modern apes [VIDEO]

Masripithecus sculpting video, sculpting by Mohammed Hebeish

Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.adz4102

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

An Early Miocene ape from the biogeographic crossroads of African and Eurasian Hominoidea

Article Publication Date

26-Mar-2026

The habits and habitats of 'living fossils' Nautilus and Allonautilus

University of Washington

Peter Ward with Nautilus and Allonautilus — image:
Peter Ward, UW professor of both biology and Earth and space sciences, has spent his career studying the "living fossils" of *Nautilus* and *Allonautilus* species. Shown here is Ward holding *Nautilus pompilius* (white) and *Allonautilus scrobiculatus* (yellow) while scuba diving off the coast of Manus Island in 2015.
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Credit: Peter Ward/University of Washington

Nautilus and Allonautilus cephalopods and their extinct ancestors have been drifting through the mesophotic zone of the ocean for more than 500 million years. Researchers have spent the last 40 years trying to understand how these mysterious "living fossils" thrive in areas with limited nutrients.

In a recent paper published in Scientific Reports, a UW-led team documented new habits and habitats for current Nautilus and Allonautilus species. These creatures appear to live in deeper water than their extinct cousins did, and the younger ones live twice as deep as the fully mature adults.

Nautilus and Allonautilus species scavenge their food and never stop moving. While a few species migrate hundreds of meters down at dawn and then back up at dusk every day, the team found that most species aren't quite as intrepid. The researchers also describe a new population of Allonautilus in waters off the island New Britain, one of several populations thriving due to hunting restrictions inspired in part by research efforts from this team.

For more information, contact senior author Peter Ward, UW professor of both biology and Earth and space sciences, at argo@uw.edu.

Other UW co-authors are Andrew Schauer, Eric Steig and Job Veloso. A full list of co-authors and funding is included in the paper.

Journal

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-026-36623-x

Article Title

Comparative habits and habitat in extant and extinct nautiloid cephalopods from acoustic telemetry and stable oxygen isotope analyses

Can AI learn to read ancient pottery the way an archaeologist does?

A new deep learning model classifies Japanese Sue ware from 3D scans with 93% accuracy while showing which parts of an object drove its decision

Nagoya University

Can AI learn to read ancient pottery the way an archaeologist does? — image:
An example of Sue ware, a type of pottery used in Japan mainly between the fifth and tenth centuries.
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Credit: Photo by Hayata Inoue / Courtesy of the Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum

Classifying ancient pottery has always depended on the trained judgment of an archaeologist. Identifying the subtle differences between piece types takes years of experience, and two experts will not always agree. Now, a team including researchers at Nagoya University in Japan has developed a deep learning model that can classify pottery by shape with high accuracy, using three-dimensional scan data rather than photographs or drawings.

What sets the approach apart is not just its accuracy: by visualizing which parts of an object the model weighted most heavily, the researchers found that it tended to focus on regions that may correspond to those expert archaeologists consider when examining a piece by hand.

“Our model lets us see which points were most important to the classification decision,” said senior author Hayata Inoue of Nagoya University’s Graduate School of Humanities. “This transparency transforms the model from a black box into a tool that helps us understand how these decisions are made.” The results were published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

A pottery type caught between categories

The study focuses on Sue ware, an unglazed stoneware used mainly between the fifth and tenth centuries in Japan. Gray to brown-gray in color, it was shaped on a potter’s wheel and fired at high temperatures in a tunnel kiln, resulting in pieces that are relatively consistent in shape and a natural candidate for classification by form.

The research examines pottery from the Sanage kiln in Aichi Prefecture, which was the dominant Sue ware production center in Japan from the eighth to the mid-ninth century. Among the types it produced, two everyday tableware categories have long posed a challenge: the Dish Body and the Bowl.

Dish-type pieces tend to have more vertical walls and flat bottoms, while bowl-type pieces have gently curving walls and bases. During the eighth to mid-ninth century, however, many examples across these two categories labeled by experts combine features of both. Researchers believe this blurring reflects a historical shift. Eating habits in Japan are thought to have changed during this period from reaching into dishes by hand to using chopsticks or spoons, and the evolving shapes of tableware may be a record of that transition.

Building a model that works in three dimensions

Earlier approaches to pottery classification using deep learning have mostly relied on 2D photographs or cross-sectional outline drawings. The limitation is straightforward: reducing a three-dimensional object to a single profile discards surface information, and two objects that look nearly identical in outline can be meaningfully different in 3D.

To move beyond this, the team used an architecture called Point Transformer, which processes three-dimensional point clouds directly. A point cloud maps thousands of spatial coordinates across an object’s surface to describe its shape in full. The team digitized 917 Sue ware pieces using an optical scanner and photogrammetry, represented each as 1,024 points, and had expert archaeologists assign labels. The model was then trained to recognize shape differences across five types: Dish Cap, Dish Body with Ring Base, Dish Body, Bowl, and Plate.

What the model reveals about the past

Across all five types, the model achieved an overall accuracy of 93.2%, performing almost perfectly on the most visually distinct categories. The lowest scores came from the Dish Body and Bowl types. The difficulty the model had separating them reflects a genuine overlap in their shapes, supporting the view that the boundary between these two types was not clearly defined during the transitional period.

To understand how the model reached its decisions, the researchers used a technique called Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), which highlights which points on an object contributed most to a given classification. For Dish Body predictions, the model focused on the rim and the steep inner angle between the base and wall. For Bowl predictions, it concentrated on the outer surface and base. These may correspond to the regions that trained archaeologists consider important when classifying pieces by hand, though the model does not always follow the same pattern.

The team has made the dataset and code freely available, and the framework is designed to be adapted for other ceramic traditions beyond Japan. “This approach does require a reasonably large sample,” said corresponding author Wataru Tatsuda, a master's student at University College London and a Nagoya University alumnus. “But we hope this study becomes a starting point for deep learning-based morphological classification of 3D data in archaeology worldwide.”

Graphical abstract shows how researchers developed a deep learning model for classifying pieces of Sue ware using 3D point cloud data.

Credit

Tatsuda, Hori, Morikawa, and Inoue (2026)

Journal

Journal of Archaeological Science

DOI

10.1016/j.jas.2026.106472

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Deep learning-based morphological classification of ceramics: A case study of 3D point cloud analysis for Sue ware, Japan

Researchers find 3,500-year-old loom that reveals key aspects of textile revolution in the Bronze Age

The finding, published in an article in the journal Antiquity, preserves most of the weights as well as components made from wood and plant fibers

University of Alicante

image:
Reconstruction of a Bronze Age loom by Beate Schneider, on display at the Alcoy Archaeological Museum.
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Credit: University of Alicante

Approximately 3,500 years ago, in the Bronze Age settlement of Cabezo Redondo in present-day Villena, a fire razed dwellings and workshops to the ground. However, the same fire that destroyed part of the village also helped preserve an object that is incredibly hard to document in archaeology: a loom with a largely wooden structure.

Recently published in the journal Antiquity, this finding by a team of researchers from several Spanish universities is one of only a few known cases in Mediterranean Europe in which both the set of loom weights and components made from wood and plant fibres have been preserved. The article is authored by University of Alicante (UA) researchers Gabriel García Atiénzar, Paula Martín de la Sierra Pareja, Virginia Barciela González and Mauro S. Hernández Pérez, Ricardo Basso Rial (University of Granada) and Yolanda Carrión Marco (Universitat de València).

UA Professor of Prehistory Gabriel García Atiénzar explains that the fire generated a very specific archaeological context where “the collapse of the ceiling was crucial […] resulting in a sealed space in which the area was suddenly destroyed and immediately buried, enabling its preservation”. The loom components – including charred timbers, clay weights and esparto ropes – were trapped beneath the remains of the collapsed ceiling.

The loom appeared during the excavation of a circulation area on the western slope of the settlement, where the researchers found a raised platform with a dense concentration of clay weights. According to University of Granada predoctoral researcher Ricardo Basso Rial, this evidence allowed the team to identify the device with a high degree of certainty, as “although the loom was recovered from a collapsed area and some pieces were missing, the compact set of 44 cylindrical weights with a central perforation, most of them about 200 grams in weight, is characteristic of a vertical warp-weighted loom”.

Several pine timbers in a parallel arrangement were discovered alongside the weights. Some of the thicker timbers, with a rectangular cross-section, are probably the remains of the upright posts of the loom frame; other narrower pieces, with a rounded cross-section, supposedly constitute the horizontal posts.

The researchers also identified plaited esparto fibres associated with the structure, and even remains of small cords in the perforations of some weights, likely used to warp the warp threads to each loom weight. Thanks to this combination of weights, timbers and fibres, the researchers have been able to accurately determine how the loom worked, which is highly unusual in prehistoric contexts.

The archaeobotanist Yolanda Carrión (Universitat de València) analysed the wooden pieces. “The preservation of the organic elements was due to the fire that charred the remains and to the fact that these remains were practically unaltered later. Paradoxically, the fire both destroyed and preserved the site”, she says.

It was concluded from the microscopic study of the wood that the loom was made from Aleppo pine, widely found in the surrounding area. According to Carrión, the observation of the growth rings suggests that the timbers came from long-lived trees that provided large-diameter pieces of wood, which indicates that the material was carefully selected. The researcher adds that “the arrangement of wooden components of various sizes, assembled with each other and resting on a wall, and the presence of the weights allow us to develop a robust hypothesis about the morphology of the loom”.

The loom was part of a wider process known as the “textile revolution” in the European Bronze Age, characterised by technological and economic changes in textile production.

For Ricardo Basso, this process was not driven by a single factor: “the textile revolution was the result of a combination of processes, including the expansion of livestock breeding for wool production, technical innovations in looms and spinning and weaving tools, and social changes that led to more intensive and diversified textile production”.

At Cabezo Redondo, these transformations are inferred from the presence of new forms of lighter spindle whorls and various types of loom weights. Some of them are lightweight enough to allow for the production of finer, more complex fabrics, such as twills. However, the fabrics themselves are rarely preserved in archaeological settings, and therefore many of these deductions are based on the indirect study of tools.

For this reason, the loom recovered from Cabezo Redondo is especially valuable, allowing researchers to “go from interpreting isolated loom weights to documenting a working loom with extreme detail: the wooden structure, the ropes, the weights and the architectural context”, Basso argues.

The context in which the loom appeared also provides information on the social organisation of work. The device was located in an outdoor space shared by several households, which suggests that production was a cooperative effort. “This indicates that different household groups may have collaborated on activities such as spinning, weaving and milling”, as noted by Paula Martín de la Sierra, a predoctoral researcher at the UA Institute for Archaeology and Heritage Research (INAPH) and research team member. “Other artisanal activities in the village, such as metalwork or ivory craftsmanship, seem to have been concentrated in specialised areas”, she adds.

Bioanthropological evidence also points to a central role of women in textile activities. In several graves at the site, teeth recovered from female remains have a degree of wear characteristically associated with spinning and weaving, as these women probably used their incisors to hold fibres in place or cut threads.

Cabezo Redondo settlement

Cabezo Redondo was not an isolated village, but a key regional hub. Its size and continued occupation, as well as the presence of monumental structures, suggest that it had a major political and economic role in the south-eastern area of the Iberian Peninsula during the second millennium BCE.

While there are similarities to the well-known Argaric culture, the researchers think that the settlement dates from a later, “post-Argaric” period. The famous Cabezo Redondo treasure is likely contemporary to the loom.

In the researchers’ view, the finding opens up new lines of research. Future studies may include archaeometric analyses of microscopic fibres or isotopic studies of sheep to determine the origin of the raw materials and the degree of specialisation of textile production.

In the meantime, the Cabezo Redondo loom is already one of the most complete examples of textile technology in the European Bronze Age. As pointed out by Basso, the settlement has become “an exceptional laboratory to study the technical and social evolution of textiles in the second millennium BCE”.

Cabezo Redondo is a major Bronze Age settlement in the south-east of the Iberian Peninsula. Systematic excavations started in 1960 under the direction of local researcher José María Soler, who intervened to prevent the destruction of the site by gypsum quarries.

From 1987 onwards, excavation campaigns at the site were led by Mauro S. Hernández. A team made up of INAPH researchers Gabriel García Atiénzar, Virginia Barciela González and others was set up afterwards.

Occupied approximately between 2100 and 1250 BCE, the settlement had a size of up to one hectare. The dwellings, built on a series of terraces on the slope of the hill, had workbenches, fireplaces, silos and receptacles for storage. The analysis of plant and animal remains indicates that the economy was based on intensive farming.

Moreover, numerous findings such as gold, silver and ivory ornaments or glass and seashell beads, among others, prove that the settlement was part of large exchange networks that connected it with other areas of the Iberian Peninsula, the Eastern Mediterranean and even Central Europe.