A New Ape From Egypt Suggests the Ancestor of All Living Apes May Not Have Lived in East Africa

A single broken jawbone from the Egyptian desert may force scientists to rethink where the family tree of living apes, including humans, began. Researchers have named a new ape species, Masripithecus moghraensis, from fossils about 17 to 18 million years old. It is the first confirmed fossil ape ever found in North Africa, and its family connections hint that the last common ancestor of all living apes may not have lived in East Africa after all.

Why East Africa was the default answer

For decades, most early ape fossils came from a small corner of the continent, mainly the Early Miocene sites of East Africa. That bias shaped the story. If your best fossils all come from one region, it is natural to assume apes began there. Meanwhile, Early Miocene sites in North Africa had produced monkeys but no confirmed apes, so that part of the map stayed blank.

What the team found at Wadi Moghra

A team led by Shorouq Al-Ashqar and senior author Hesham Sallam of Mansoura University in Egypt worked at Wadi Moghra in northern Egypt, with US collaborators including Erik Seiffert of the University of Southern California. Sallam said the group searched for five years for a fossil like this. Excavations in 2023 and 2024 recovered the remains, and Al-Ashqar found a lower jaw with a wisdom tooth in 2024. The researchers published the work in the journal Science in March 2026.

The name combines the Arabic word for Egypt, Masr, with the Greek word for ape, and the species name honors Wadi Moghra. The jaw carries an unusually large canine and large premolars, molars with rounded and strongly textured chewing surfaces, and a sturdy build. Together, the authors say, those features point to an animal adapted for versatility. They infer a diet based mainly on fruit that could stretch to harder foods such as nuts or seeds when needed.

How the fossil reshapes the family tree

The team built an evolutionary tree using anatomy, DNA from living species and the ages of fossils. In that analysis, Masripithecus sits closer to living apes than any known Early Miocene ape from East Africa. A second analysis, which estimates how early apes moved across landscapes, suggests that apes may have evolved in northern Africa or the Middle East. From there, they may have spread into Europe and Asia, with some groups later returning to Africa.

Shifting African and Arabian plates and changing sea levels may have created temporary land routes that made those journeys possible. Seiffert, who long favored an East African origin, said the findings strongly challenge his own view. He also noted that the new scenario does not depend on Masripithecus alone, although the fossil fits it well.

Why it matters for human origins

Humans belong to the ape family, so the origin of the living apes is part of our own deep history. Moving the likely birthplace away from East Africa does not change the later story of human evolution. It does change the stage on which it opened, and it shows how much the fossil record can mislead when scientists have searched only a few places. As Sallam put it, something was missing, and North Africa holds that missing piece.

What we still do not know

Caution matters here. The entire species rests on part of one lower jaw, so nothing is known about its body, size or limbs. The diet comes from tooth shape, and the origin story is a statistical inference rather than a direct observation. Masripithecus is described as close to the lineage of modern apes, not as a confirmed direct ancestor.

Outside experts agree the find is important but warn against overreading it. Susanne Cote of the University of Calgary pointed out that many regions outside East Africa are poorly sampled, so apes were probably more widespread than the record shows. She said that does not mean North Africa was the only place they lived. James Rossie of Stony Brook University said the discovery shows that our view of ape evolution in Afro-Arabia still has huge blind spots.

The next test is more fieldwork. Al-Ashqar says other North African countries, such as Morocco, Tunisia and Libya, may hold undiscovered early apes. If more fossils turn up, they will show whether this jaw marks a true homeland or just one stop on a much wider map.

Sources

• Al-Ashqar et al., “An Early Miocene ape from the biogeographic crossroads of African and Eurasian Hominoidea,” Science 391(6792): 1383, 2026, DOI 10.1126/science.adz4102 (https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adz4102)
• Mansoura University release via ScienceDaily (https://sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260723084852.htm)
• Science News (https://sciencenews.org/article/early-apes-not-evolved-east-africa)
• The Independent (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/fossil-ape-egypt-human-origin-history-b3077378.html)