First-ever chimpanzee fossils found

More "settled science"?

The first-ever chimpanzee fossils were recently discovered in an area previously thought to be unsuitable for chimps. Fossils from human ancestors were also found nearby.

Although researchers have only found a few chimp teeth, the discovery could cause a shake-up in the theories of human evolution.

“We know today if you go to western and central Africa that humans and chimps live in similar and neighboring environments,” said Nina Jablonski, an anthropologist at the California Academy of Sciences. “This is the first evidence in the fossil record that they coexisted in the same place in the past.”

It had previously been thought that chimps never lived in the arid Rift Valley — they prefer more lush environments like the Congo and jungles of western Africa. For years, scientists believed that early human ancestors left the jungles and moved east to the less wooded grasslands, and that this move caused the evolutionary split between the human and chimp lines.