Primate Ancestry


    An article appearing in Natural History (8/92) indicates that the ancient North American lemur (Northarctus) was previously thought to be more primitive than the European variety and not to have contributed directly to primate and the human lineage. Recent fossil discoveries made at Bitter Creek, east of the Bridger Basin, Wyoming, have completely altered this view. Formerly described as a fox-faced little primate similar to today's ring tailed lemur, the finding of an almost complete skull shows Northarctus to have had a much smaller muzzle than either extinct adapids or many living lemurs. Its discoverer states that it may have independently evolved a few features of the anthropoids, such as the reduced lachrymal bone of the face, and that, in some ways, Northarctus more closely resembles the ancestral stock that produced the monkeys and apes than the line that led to the Malagasy lemurs and sifakas of Madagasca. The Urantia Book states:

    Slightly to the west of India, on land now under water and
among the offspring of Asiatic migrants of the older North American lemur types, the dawn mammals suddenly appeared. These small animals walked mostly on their hind legs, and they possessed large brains in proportion to their size and in comparison with the brains of other animals. In the seventieth generation of this order of life a new and higher group of animals suddenly differentiated. These new mid-mammals - almost twice the size and height of their ancestors and possessing proportionately increased brain power - had only well established themselves when the Primates, the third vital mutation, suddenly appeared. (At this same time, a retrograde development within the mid-mammal stock gave origin to the simian ancestry; and from that day to this, the human branch has gone forward by progressive evolution, while the simian tribes have remained stationary or actually regressed.) (700)

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