The Primate Fossil Record

Abstract

W. C. Hartwig (ed.). 2002. The Primate Fossil Record. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 530 + xiv pp. ISBN 0-521-66315-6, price (cloth), $175.00. This valuable new volume challenges significant components of the normal view of primate history. In Chapter 1, the editor briefly comments that “… fossil primates have always been interpreted in light of how they might relate to living ones. Whether this tendency stems from scientific insight or myopia, a framework of closely related forms and conservative phylogenies has persevered.” In the normal view (e.g., Clark 1959; Eisenberg 1981; Fleagle 1999), the earliest primates were Plesiadapiformes (or were closely related to them) that “took to the trees” at the end of the Cretaceous. The suborder Prosimii emerged in the Eocene, and ancestral Anthropoidea diverged in the Late Eocene in Africa. Derived African anthropoids of the Oligocene that retained only 2 premolars founded our infraorder Catarrhini. The super-family Hominoidea radiated in East Africa and Eurasia beginning in the early Miocene, but by the Pliocene, specialized Cercopithecoidea (Old World monkeys) had replaced most hominoids. A bipedal African hominoid begat the family Hominidae during climatic perturbations of the Plio-Pleistocene. Fieldwork and analysis by the contributors to this book over the last 2 decades have revised several key points of this view, but the editor (Chapter 1) makes it clear that the volume is not a new synthesis of fossil and living primate sys-tematics. Instead, multiple systematic inferences coexist, supported by conflicting interpretations of the same evidence. Following the brief introduction, Rasmus sen reviews current functional models for the origin of the primates by reprising his observations of Caluromys derbianus to address 2 competing hypotheses, that primates were initially successful “visual predators” (Cartmill 1972) and that primates initially exploited fruits at terminal branches of …