Reply to Godfrey et al.: Outside the box

Abstract

We thank Godfrey et al. (1) for their comments comparing the possible diet of Hadropithecus with that of Paranthropus boisei (2, 3). We wrote: “Indeed, the only known haplorrhine primate with a similar carbon isotope composition is the extinct grass-eating baboon Theropithecus oswaldi,” which explicitly excluded Hadropithecus and other Malagasy strepsirrhine primates from the comparison as they are only very distantly related to modern apes and humans. Molecular and morphological approaches indicate that the strepsirrhine-haplorrhine divergence occurred before the Eocene (4, 5).