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Journal of Paleontology

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REVIEW

¹ Museum of Paleontology University of Michigan 1109 Geddes Avenue Ann Arbor, 48109-1079 <ggunnell@umich.edu>

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey: Unearthing the Origins of Monkeys, Apes, and Humans. Chris Beard. 2004. University of California Press, Berkeley, 348 p. ISBN: 0-520-23369-7

It has never ceased to amaze me what a contentious topic the origin of Anthropoidea (the Primate suborder that includes all living monkeys, apes, and humans) is (see Ross and Kay, 2004). The wrangling includes not only such issues as where, when, and from what ancestry anthropoids arose, but also the definition of Anthropoidea and their recognition in the fossil record. These fundamental disagreements are even more surprising in light of just how few evolutionary biologists involve themselves in trying to decipher the history of this group. In his new book, The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey, Chris Beard offers his view on the evolutionary history of anthropoids. He espouses an Asian deep time origin for Anthropoidea, a view that many "traditionalists" will likely find hard to accept.

Although the author eschews the "ladder-approach" to evolution, the book itself is partially organized in a ladderlike fashion with an introductory chapter laying out the chief issues and introducing many of the personalities involved in the anthropoid origins debate. The focus of this introductory chapter is to make the case that a tree-like evolutionary paradigm is preferable to a more archaic ladderlike approach. This lays the groundwork for the author's adherence to a stem-based definition for anthropoids as opposed to a crown-based listing of shared character states that must be present to recognize any particular fossil (or living specimen) as a member of the suborder. While almost universally accepted, a stem-based definition has its own difficulties.

The next three chapters are arranged along the lines of Le Gros Clark's (1959) vision of a "Great Chain of Being" for primates with lengthy discussions of the history . . . [Full Text of this Article]