ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2012
Evidence for a convergent slowdown in primate molecular rates and its implications for the timing of early primate evolution.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 38 papers.
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Who cites it
38 citing papers in PubMed.
- Parting ways: Pan-Homo divergence revisited.Primates; journal of primatology · 2026Review
- But how does it smell? An investigation of olfactory bulb size among living and fossil primates and other euarchontoglirans.Anatomical record (Hoboken, N.J. : 2007) · 2026Article
- Feeding in Forest Chimpanzees: Do Food Type and Canopy Location Predict Positional Behavior?American journal of biological anthropology · 2026Article
- Movement representations in motor, somatosensory, and posterior parietal cortex of the greater galago.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- The provisioned primate: patterns of obesity across lemurs, monkeys, apes and humans.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Article
- Ontogenetic allometry and scaling in catarrhine crania.Journal of anatomy · 2021Article
- Biodiversity of protists and nematodes in the wild nonhuman primate gut.The ISME journal · 2020Article
- Organization of extrastriate and temporal cortex in chimpanzees compared to humans and macaques.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2019Article
- Primitive Old World monkey from the earliest Miocene of Kenya and the evolution of cercopithecoid bilophodonty.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Fossil lemurs from Egypt and Kenya suggest an African origin for Madagascar's aye-aye.Nature communications · 2018Article
- Using Phylogenomic Data to Explore the Effects of Relaxed Clocks and Calibration Strategies on Divergence Time Estimation: Primates as a Test Case.Systematic biology · 2018Article
- Evolution of Brain Active Gene Promoters in Human Lineage Towards the Increased Plasticity of Gene Regulation.Molecular neurobiology · 2018Article
- Personality in the chimpanzees of Gombe National Park.Scientific data · 2017Article
- Evidence of a chimpanzee-sized ancestor of humans but a gibbon-sized ancestor of apes.Nature communications · 2017Article
- Discovery of a new repeat family in the Callithrix jacchus genome.Genome research · 2016Article
- Contextualising primate origins--an ecomorphological framework.Journal of anatomy · 2016Review
- Evolution of posterior parietal cortex and parietal-frontal networks for specific actions in primates.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2016Review
- Life history of the most complete fossil primate skeleton: exploring growth models for Darwinius.Royal Society open science · 2015Article
- The Hand of Cercopithecoides williamsi (Mammalia, Primates): Earliest Evidence for Thumb Reduction among Colobine Monkeys.PloS one · 2015Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
A long-standing problem in primate evolution is the discord between paleontological and molecular clock estimates for the time of crown primate origins: the earliest crown primate fossils are ~56 million y (Ma) old, whereas molecular estimates for the haplorhine-strepsirrhine split are often deep in the Late Cretaceous. One explanation for this phenomenon is that crown primates existed in the Cretaceous but that their fossil remains have not yet been found. Here we provide strong evidence that this discordance is better-explained by a convergent molecular rate slowdown in early primate evolution. We show that molecular rates in primates are strongly and inversely related to three life-history correlates: body size (BS), absolute endocranial volume (EV), and relative endocranial volume (REV). Critically, these traits can be reconstructed from fossils, allowing molecular rates to be predicted for extinct primates. To this end, we modeled the evolutionary history of BS, EV, and REV using data from both extinct and extant primates. We show that the primate last common ancestor had a very small BS, EV, and REV. There has been a subsequent convergent increase in BS, EV, and REV, indicating that there has also been a convergent molecular rate slowdown over primate evolution. We generated a unique timescale for primates by predicting molecular rates from the reconstructed phenotypic values for a large phylogeny of living and extinct primates. This analysis suggests that crown primates originated close to the K-Pg boundary and possibly in the Paleocene, largely reconciling the molecular and fossil timescales of primate evolution.
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