Karyotypic fission theory and the evolution of old world monkeys and apes

Abstract

The karyotypes of living catarrhines are correlated with the current concepts of their fossil record and systematic classification. A phylogeny, beginning at the base of the Oligocene, for those animals and their chromosome numbers is presented. Toddś (1970) theory of karyotypic fissioning is applied to this case — three fissioning events are hypothesized. A late Eocene event (the primary catarrhine fissioning) is hypothesized to underlie the diversification of the infraorder Catarrhini into its extant families, the second fissioning underlies the radiation of the Pongidae/Hominidae in the Miocene and the third accounts for the high chromosome numbers (54–72) and the Neogene (Miocene-Pliocene-Pleistocene) radiation of members of the genus Cercopithecus. Published catarrhine chromosome data, including that for “marked” chromosomes (those with a large achromatic region that is the site for ribosomal RNA genes) are tabulated and analysed. The ancestral X chromosome is always retained in the unfissioned metacentric state. The Pongidae/Hominidae have 15 pairs of mediocentric chromosomes that survived the second fissioning whereas the other chromosomes (besides the X) are thought to be fission-derived acrocentrics. Both the detailed karyology and the trend from low to high numbers is best interpreted to support Toddś concept of adaptive radiations correlated with karyotypic fissioning in ancestral populations.