These ancient Asian primate fossils might be the missing pieces of a major evolutionary puzzle

For decades, scientists thought that the story of human evolution was fairly straightforward: We and our primate ancestors evolved in Africa over millions of years, then started crossing continents and traversing seas to reach all the places we’re found today. Simple (ish).

But then, in the 1990s, researchers in China made a surprising discovery: The fossil of a tiny monkey-like creature that was some 10 million years older than anything that had been found in Africa. The ancestors of apes, and ultimately us, seemed to have come from Asia. But they hadn’t stayed there.

“There were a lot of questions,” said K. Christopher Beard, a paleontologist at the University of Kansas. “What caused it was the biggest kind of cosmic question, because we always want to answer ‘why?’ But even things like ‘when?’ and ‘how?’ were a mystery.”

Decades later, “the full story is only now emerging,” Beard said. And a new discovery could help fill in the gaps...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/05/06/these-ancient-asian-primate-fossils-might-be-the-missing-pieces-of-a-major-evolutionary-puzzle/