Sivapithecus, the orangutan's ancestor
A face from the Siwaliks looks unmistakably like an orangutan — but the body below it does not.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 4 million years
- Known to
- ± 1 million years
- Era
- Miocene, Cenozoic
Sivapithecus, from Pakistan and India, has a face with the narrow closely-set orbits, smooth floor of the nose and distinctive incisor proportions that mark it as a member of the orangutan lineage — one of the clearest cases in the record of a fossil being assigned to a living genus's ancestry on facial anatomy alone. Its arm bones, however, lack the extreme suspensory adaptations of a modern orangutan, indicating that orangutan-style hanging evolved after the facial characters. Its relative Gigantopithecus becomes the largest primate ever.