There Shouldn't Be Monkeys In South America
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- Опубліковано 27 бер 2023
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Primates are super common in South America, living almost anywhere you can find trees. But as it turns out, we don't have a simple explanation for how their evolutionary ancestors got there... except, maybe rafts?
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🙂🙃😉
lemurs on rockets
you should like this comment, just because ;)
At 1:33 when covering the teilhardina brandti there's a picture of a fingernail??
Is there any doubt as to whether selfishness and consent are the same (and that otherwise, we'd be talking about extremism {shamanism}/radicalism)?
Is there any doubt as to whether An Arrest begins the moment when a suspect is born, rather than when he starts acting out a paranoid overreaction which will cause me to help any officer kill him on camera?
Why don't we ask them to vote on whether god already told them to build world trade centers, or if he's about to say it soon? Is it because their only stance is "anti-literacy"?
Members of my family, as well, have been holding a grudge since before [the 'Promethean Torch' of] spoken language was brought to the tribe by The Translators, whose first word they taught to us was 'dead', and frankly, I'm still mad that they killed ME in order to notify or even attempt to 'teach' me that although I may have some traditions, spoken language may perhaps be a good suggestion for further, future developments within that tradition/culture. This is common nowadays among pirates.
Amazon is full os lost fossil they may evolved on the south america continent or they were BRINGED AS PET WITH HUMANS!
We had to debate this question in my biology class in college for a writing assignment. One of the other theories not mentioned here is that there was also likely a route from Africa to South America through antarctica, because the colder temperatures and shallower oceans meant ice shelves could have formed more easily to connect the southern tips of both continents. This theory has the same issue as the raft one though, in that all of the evidence would have either melted away and sunk into the ocean, or been buried under millions of years of Antarctic glacial ice.
One of these theories is probably right, right?
SERVER MIGRATION
Interesting. Everyone focuses on the Bering Straight Bridge, but forget there is a Southern Option.
They were hacking. The devs patched it but the patch notes were lost.
@@BenlshTracker I CAUGHT THAT HYPERTENSION
IN ANOTHER DIMENSION
INSIDE MY TIME INVENTION
I'VE LAMINATED DENIM
Picture a crew of monkey pirates sailing a mangrove ship across the ocean, howling their sailor songs, hunting for stowaways, battling the seabirds, and fishing for sea monsters among the roots! Could be more than just a tall tail
@Talitha that sounds Ike a fun book :)
Tale*
I'd watch that movie / show
Every few years fishermen from the Cap Verde islands in rowboats end up in Northern Brazil when they have been picked up by a storm. There Is a very fast current going from the Cap Verde islands across the Atlantic to the northern coast of Brazil.
So yes, I think it is very plausible that the primates were swept across on a raft of vegetation, like a a big tree.
Yes, and Steve Callahan capsized off Canary Islands and drifted with South Equatorial Current and trade winds before washing up in the Antilles after 76 days.
@@rickwrites2612 omg. What an ordeal.
I'm capeverdean and in 2015 a fisherman was found off of the brazilian coast after spending 58 days lost at sea
I was wondering is any people have rafted out to sea following a storm, by accident? Maybe not - most people would try to go inland, rather than cling to a clump of mangrove in a storm, I am just curious. A small monkey would of course be more likely to survive on such an accidental raft, there might be vegetation it can eat, and rainwater would collect there, they could at least lick it from the leaves and branches, if there did not happen to be any indentations where it would pool.
@TulilaSalome yes, I seem to remember some press stories to that extent. However, if you get into the right spot in the Cape Verde Islands or the West African coast, there is an extremely fast with 10 - 12 d crossing possible, due to the fast westerly ocean current.
Monkeys weren't the only mammals that reached South America from Africa around that time. Rodents did too, specifically Hystricomorph rodents, today represented by capybaras, guinea pigs, chinchillas, viscachas, tree porcupines, etc.
And the odd marsupial... The opossum.
@@rahowherox1177 Marsupials arrived in South America long before, around the Cretaceous-Paleocene boundary, and came from North America.
@@Mhc-zp9kcother way around. South America first.
@@rahowherox1177Oldest South American Metatherian known is Cocatherium from the lower Paleocene. Older Cretaceous Metatherians are known from North America and East Asia. Later on, they got extinct there and thrived in South America, only to reconquer North America in the last 3-4 MYa when both continents were united again.
@@Mhc-zp9kc I'm talking the modern day opossum. Not it's ancestors, whatever they were called.
i don't think rafting is so far fetched as one might think. Imagine a tsunami washing clumps of a mangrove forest out to sea with a family of lemurs taking shelter from the waters in its branches. The south Atlantic ocean gyre would carry it right to south America. A similar phenomenon occurred after the fukushima tsunami where some fishing boats carried out to sea wound up washing ashore in the US
The last time I visited Oregon I stopped at a small Aquarium. One of the residents was a fish from Fukushima which had ridden over in a pool of water in the bottom of a boat.
How do you survive without water for weeks?
Wasn’t that tracked with a shipment of rubber ducks? Or was that a different accidental experiment?
@@Haskellerz Rain could have been a source of fresh water. If a whole mess of trees was swept across to south America there might have been some fruits on some of them.
I never will buy the grass raft hypothesis...its nonsense. No "raft" of this sort, laden with hopeful animal pilgrims has ever, EVER, been observed. So how did these creatures spread to isolated or distant places?.....THEY WALKED !!. There were obviously land or ice bridges we haven't theorized about yet. Same with south sea PEOPLE !!!
Hank: The monkeys were not lashing together rafts and making vessels.
Me: *But what if they were tho?* - Just think of it, Monkey Pirates...
bloons
Monkey Sea, Monkey Do
I mean, technically pirates are apes
@@thatpandaz6094 but not monkeys ;)
@@thatpandaz6094 I mean technically apes are mammals
Often times these explainer videos make it sounds like things have to happen one way or another, so I appreciate the nuance here. Laurasia, a supercontinent, was still breaking up as recently as 40 mya, and when coupled with lower sea levels, it is really easy to see how old world and new world primates could have just island hopped around from about 66 mya - 40 mya. It doesn't even have to happen all at once, as a confluence of different environmental factors can often result in genetic drift and speciation.
Maybe a combination of all those methods, some island hoping, others rafting . I imagine small mammals could survive eating the branches and leaves of the raft they where traveling on. It would be interesting to know what other species are common in both continents with the possibility they traveled together if the fossils are around the same age.
Yes, like it's possible a whole little ecosystem traveled.
There is a whole chain of now submerged hotspot islands in the southern Atlantic (Tristan hotspot). These islands are estimated to have existed around 40 million years ago so it fits rather neatly with the whole Africa to America monkey travel.
island hopping if you will
I appreciate this information, thank you.
Interesting!
I've read about those islands before. I think thats more likely than rafting across the Atlantic
That would make it more plausible... do it in stages
I live on the West Coast of North America, and this is just reminding me of when we had debris from Japan washing up on our shores as part of the aftermath of the Tsunamis. This resulted in several tropical japanese fish appearing the the waters. Makes me thing if there was a Tsunami or large landslide of the west coast of africa something similar could have happened with the monkeys
This can spread aquatic species quite easily. The issue is land species.
Interesting observation. But we didn't see any Japanese monkeys or wild boars or deer float over.
@@Juancilra The tsunami would kill them. Rafting without tsunamis would be less improbable.
@@Juancilra Yes, but also the Pacific is massive, compared to the Atlantic, evenmoreso back then, the Atlantic ocean is but a puddle, yes, it's probable many land animals could have rafted through it after massive landslides following tsunamis or other cataclisms.
I watched Madagascar 2 -- they took a plane.
thank you so much for still making cool science vids, i remember watching you and ur brother back in freshman year 😳
Intersting video, just one thing I was hoping to touch upon:
Distance measurments: at around 4:40 you guys talk about miles across the oceans. The thing I as a European struggel with is the multitude of miles used thoughout the centuries and that are still in use and how to convert them into the metric. In this case I was wondering if it's the American mile or the sea mile or a different one alltogether. Personally I would really appreciate it, if that could be clearer or if the metric system was added, too. At least on screen to read.
"For the last time, Hank, we can't tell people to kick all the monkeys out of South America. I don't care that it would mean more monkeys in North America! Yes I know you want to pet them, but it's just not going to work out how you think!"
I’m imaging ZeFrank saying this 😂
@@kl8813 Zefrank scishow crossover... perfect idea
Dammit!!!!
@@Goldenheart_345 I’d watch that
Thanks for the reminder. I'm several episodes behind on True Facts.
You see there were these penguins who also happened to be escape artists.. they helped them make the rafts 😋
Since this happened millions of years ago here are a few things I can think of:
The continents were not in the exact same places as they are now.
Different plant species existed as well as creatures in general, which relates to the next point...
The rafting idea, kind of like what Pi went through in Life of Pi when he landed on meerkat island that just floats in the ocean.
Islands that may have existed then between Africa and South America that no longer exist now.
But it is strange indeed and a little bit annoying how we don't know exactly how they did it.
but when it's about paleontology, we are much better informe today than decades ago. and we will know much more (or all in certain topics) next decades. just think about the origin of indigenous in americas, nowadays it's possible to track the genetics marks along the history and asia, so does the similarities between languages spoken in siberia and north canada. many other fields add up answers to "misteries".
Just a brief lookup of the Eocene and I see a map that shows a pretty significant difference in how wide the Atlantic was. Africa was almost twice as close to us then as it is now. And WAY closer to South America than it is now. If the map is accurate, there's a spot where the Gold Coast and Brazil are only about 4x as wide as modern Africa and Madagascar. That's for sure a doable journey!
my first thought was "is there a possibility humans brought them for some reason?" i cant think of a reason we would but we have in our history moved alot of animals around for lots of weird reasons.
Humans definitely helped a lot of animals and plants disperse around the world, but not in this case. The oldest fossils of monkeys in South America are ~35 million years old; the genus Homo has only existed for a few million years and only made it to the western hemisphere ~12,000 years ago.
@@mattj4005 A few years ago you would have said humans only existed in the Americas about 6,000 years ago. Could it be that that 12k isn't right either. It's more than likely humans existed in the Americas before the Ice Age melted down.
Too early - they clearly differ from Old World monkeys in many ways, they diversified before Homo Sapiens had evolved.
@@poppinc8145 No matter how far back you push human immigration into the Americas, you can't get it to ~35 million years ago. Even if you could, you still have the same problem: humans (transporting monkeys, for some reason) would have to make it out of Africa and either 1) cross the Tethys Ocean into Asia, travel via Beringia to N. America, then cross another ocean into S. America; or 2) cross the south Atlantic from Africa to S. America. Not to mention the fact that no human remains have been found in either N. or S. America for the entirety of that 35 million years (save the last 12,000 or so) and there's no evidence humans underwent a radiation into multiple species during that time while S. American monkeys did.
Another idea is that alien visitors/researchers could have brought them there. Maybe they abducted them for research and then released them somewhere else, or they got on an alien spaceship as blind passengers. Similar to how we humans brought a lot of species to new continents intentionally or unintentionally.
I honestly wonder about the "paleo-Houdini" thing. Yes, it seems pretty unlikely, but fossilization is not an easy task. It's entirely possible that the land trek is exactly what happened, and we just... haven't found any of those fossils yet.
It always frustrates me to think about all the gaps in our understanding that arise simply because, if there's evidence out there, we haven't found it. In my lifetime, we've *doubled* the amount of time we know humans have been in the Americas, simply because we suddenly found some older evidence.
The problem with that--and Hank didn't mention it in the video, but it's addressed in a number of the sources in the video description--is that Africa and South America were island continents at the time. So they'd still have to cross an ocean to get from Africa to Asia, and again to get from North America to South America. (Not to mention that the earliest primates and primate relatives probably originated in Asia, so they had to cross an ocean to get to Africa where the first monkeys evolved and then get back to Asia)
@mattj4005 humans made it to Australia, and certainly monkeys did as well, and then there's Gondwana, which splitted Madagascar and India before. I watched a documentary once that raised more questions than answered. That's why I find that these hypotheses are very fascinating. Lemurs , according to it, are feebly connected to monkeys. They also mentioned that there is one marsupial that lives in Peru, a rodent, first time I heard of that. Paleontology is very interesting science. So, let's keep learning more about it.
Part of the issue is genetics. If primates from the westernmost tip of Africa are more closely related to South American monkeys than monkeys that are farther east/closer to the middle east (where they'd need to cross to get to the Strait eventually), it adds to the idea of the raft.
Very little skeletal remains of ancient humans have been found in South Asia, it's mostly tools. Even fewer evidence of pre-human humanoids. So your assertion is possible.
As for your second point, politics plays a significant part in academic science and when certain theories become dogma it can take decades or even centuries to supersede them.
@@coucoubrandy1079 Monkeys never made it to Australia (other than zoos and such). They stop at Wallace's line in Indonesia, the region separating mostly Asian faunas from mostly Australian faunas. Lemurs (along with lorises and bushbabies) are one branch of the primate family tree, the other branch includes tarsiers and anthropoids (which includes S. American monkeys, and Old World monkeys, apes & humans). There are many different marsupials that live in South America, most are related to the Virginia opossum from North America (the Virginia opossum immigrated from S. America when the two continents became connected). One S. American marsupial is most closely related to Australian marsupials--the monito del monte. It is likely a remnant of an ancient group of marsupials that dispersed from S. America to Australia via Antarctica before the three continents separated and the Australian marsupials became isolated there.
4:56 owww...my knee still hurts from that old arrow wound
Always interesting, thanks.
Wouldn't the genetic bottleneck from such sporadic events be absolutely brutal on a species?
Not if a large event occurred, like a massive tsunami. Dozens or hundreds of miles of impacted coastline could provide the materials (foliage) for a very large raft, potentially containing hundreds of primates, possibly multiple species.
@@jaredwilson9979 large trees have been found floating, those could have had food and been still growing fruits for a bit
Life, uh, finds a way
Yes, it could be -- what we would have is the survivors, after around 35 million years of diversification. It might be difficult to detect genetic bottle-necking so long ago. There is another wrinkle, though -- this need not have been one event. There may have been chains of islands, or even a 'southern route' set of land/or and ice bridges; so, many small groups of primates could have been surviving accidental trips to South America during a window of a few million years.
@@MasterGhostf Good point, not to mention the edible foliage and stored sugars in the wood and roots. A mangrove raft that massive would attract the attention of fish and birds, which may have been a viable food source for the rafters. All of these would have provided minute amounts of water, along with the "raft" having some capability to capture rainwater along the way. They could slurp rain from a buddy's back hair if needed. Primates would have been able to survive a few weeks at sea under those conditions.
Absolutely fascinating...Finally, details emerge...
I'm voting for hovercrafts
Hovercrafts are typically full of eels though.
I think the wicked witch of the west gave them wings so they could get to the west. The wings dissolved when the witch did.
Aliens.
I heard ancient Atlanteans had powerful airships that could transport monkeys, no problem.
i m voting for reading more about those theories. the, "hopping island", that says there was a line of islands connecting both continents when the ocean was much lower, is as interesting as the "rafting" one. love them.
It’s crazy that this was just uploaded 2 days ago because I just looked this up this morning because this exact question popped into my brain
This is the kind of information that I needed in my life right now.
A number of iconic South American animal groups rafted over from Africa during the Oligocene along with the monkeys, like the caviomorph rodents and even the terror birds, but one of the ideas for how this happened that wasn't mentioned here hypothesized that there used to be islands between Africa and South America that no longer exist that could enable land animals to stop periodically until another storm swept them further across the ocean. This island hopping would've meant that the entire migration didn't happen in a single grand event, which is much more probable for animals that can't go too long without fresh water like primates.
That primates (including humans) and other mammals can't survive on salt water is a common and sometimes deadly misconception. The salinity of the Atlantic ocean is low enough that it only kills you IF you are already dehydrated. If you don't hesitate drinking salt water, it will make you very unwell, but you will survive. People have crossed the Atlantic without any fresh water to debunk this misconception. But because of that misconception most people refuse to drink salt water until they are too dehydrated to survive drinking it. Animals don't have that misconception, so they will just drink it and survive the trip.
Subsequent storms and the flotsam and jetsam rafts over time, like you mention, a solid presumption.
I never will buy the grass raft hypothesis...its nonsense. No "raft" of this sort, laden with hopeful animal pilgrims has ever, EVER, been observed. So how did these creatures spread to isolated or distant places?.....THEY WALKED !!. There were obviously land or ice bridges we haven't theorized about yet. Same with south sea PEOPLE !!!
It is true that thousands of miles of the Azores have subsided about ten thousand feet within tens of thousands of years; at least 10× the current land area used to be exposed.
Looking farther back, Australia was nearly twice its current size above sea-level, many millions of years ago.
Antarctica has had rapid shifts back & forth between continental glaciation & merely alpine, over geologically tiny time spans.
Many humans tend to think of the ocean as an impassable barrier for landgoing creatures, but between rapid elevation changes, ice bridges, & sea-level change, the distances may not have always been so great as our current landscape may lead us to believe.
@@prophetzarquon1922 Exactly...to put it simply...THEY WALKED !!.
Rafting wasn't just a hypothesis thought up for these monkeys. Naturalists had observed how tree trunks washed up on shore carried various animals and other species. They recorded this since at least the early 1800s. Darwin himself observed this and noted observations by others in his research notes. Dense rafts of trees and vegetation washed down by floods were observed over the years.
Looking at the image at 4:32, there is quite a large chain of undersea mountains making a small kind of path from southern Africa to South America. Not saying it would have been really a land crossing at the time, but maybe more like short Island hopping, one to the next until they made it to South America. Just a thought
This reminds me of the Ice Age 4 movie where they get stranded on a large piece of ice that also has a rock with trees on it attached to it and use it like a ship, and encounter a bunch of pirate animals using a large iceberg as a ship. They also get to a new island with it.
"I like to move it move it!" - Lemur King
King Julian
@@samuelfraley8737 "You like to... MOVE IT!"
Would love to see an episode on the monkeys used in agriculture during the 1900's to drive tractors and operate simple machinery and stuff.
You should ask the History Guy to do it. He blends science and history together very nicely.
Never heard about that before. Is this what the Planet of the Apes story was inspired upon?
@@AudieHolland Ha! maybe.😀
BTW there's a video of a monkey driving a golf cart somewhere on YT. Enjoyable.
I'd like to see a video on old-world vs. new-world vultures. Not that long ago, in evolutionary terms, both groups of vultures had representatives on both landmasses. But local extinctions wiped out opposite families on opposite sides of the Atlantic. I'm curious what adaptations made each family that much more suited to their current continent.
Na América não existe abutre, as aves que fazem o serviço de limpeza são os urubus que tem umas 5 espécies e os condores dos Andes e da Califórnia que são aves aparentadas e aparentemente pertencem ao grupo das cegonhas, não são aves de rapinas típicas, já os abutres do Velho Mundo são aves de rapinas típicas próximos das águias e falcões
@@atlas567 If Wikipedia and Google Translate are to be believed, both the Portuguese words "abutre" and "urubu" translate to the English word "vulture." Wikipedia suggest "abutre" could be more specifically translated as "Old World vulture," and "urubu" could be more specifically translated as "New World vulture." I suspect this is a case where the Portuguese language is more precise than English.
@@billberg1264 ua-cam.com/video/UsVnwZ-JkUk/v-deo.html. Urubus do Novo Mundo
@@billberg1264 ua-cam.com/video/h4BIEhHnKrc/v-deo.html
Botanically, the think a similar drift could be how the bottle gourd (Langeneria) is found in both the old AND new worlds (most new world gourds are Cucurbita, same as squashes and pumpkins but there are Langeneria ones as well.) A bottle gourd floated across the ocean, landed in South America, broke open, released it's seeds, and the population started.
Something similar supposedly happened with something called the White Tsamma melon (Cucurmenopis manii).
Now this is weird. I first learned about this rafting hypothesis at college!
One of those few times when I knew about a topic before SciShow releases a video about it.
Cool, sounds easy enough to confirm: Just dig up the entire southern Atlantic Ocean searching for monkey skeletons. No problem!
Amazing! I always wondered how the old world and new world primates were so physically different yet the same order. A distant relative appearing out of nowhere at the party.
Wow , excellent video
Can't imagine they would be in good health on the other side even if they are more resilient. Even if there was some food on the raft, either. It's quite amazing they would be able to find food and water quickly and nurse themselves back to health after such a journey.
If they rafted over on the right kind of tree that was washed out to sea by a tsunami, they might have had sufficient food for at least half the trip, if not the whole thing.
@@davidbriggs7365 And rain water could have been collected in tree trunks and leaves. who knows. we certainly don't...yet.
South America has a lot of leaves and water, hasn't it [and a lot more in ancient times]? Surely a primate skilled in finding these things could do so very quickly.
It would only need a few surviving monkeys. Surely this could have happened many more times, with no survivors left.
Remember, it only took 4 rabbits to entirely infest Australia. It wouldn't have taken many surviving monkeys to populate most of S. America.
In your face, Thor Heyerdahl!😂
What an unusual reconstruction of Teilhardina. I wasn't able to find a full list of fossils used to identify it, other than a couple of new jaw ones and a hand bone. Sometimes the internet can be a bit dense, no matter how specific you are. Does anybody know what bones were used in the original and subsequent identifications.
Great video on an important and under-recognised wonder of natural history. There is no doubt that rafting occurred across oceans - for instance not once but several times to bring primates to Madagascar, that became lemurs. Plus several primate rafting’s to South America. Perhaps more remarkably rodents also rafted across the Atlantic from Africa to South America to give rise to the Caviamorphs such as the guineapig and capibara - 41 million years ago.
Admittedly Madagascar is much closer to Africa than South America, across the Atlantic Ocean.
Why is there an image of toenail fungus at 1:35 ? 😂
i was literally just scrolling the channel when this came out
I was metaphysically scrolling when this came out
@@hydroids shaddap
I like your pfp.
@@hydroids except that the poster literally used "literally" in its original non-figurative sense, which is NOT a misuse of the word.
Well, who knows, but here they are and we love them!
The likely reason was because of pumice rafts that connect island chains together. And the Tristan Hotspot further proves my theory of island chains in the South Atlantic. Mangrove Rafts also could have contributed as well.
Atlantic Ocean . By the way, I have difficulty communicating because I had a stroke in Broca’s area, the part of the brain that controls speech. 2/8/2021 but I lived again. (My wife helped me compose this.)
I know this probably won’t get seen, but thank you so much for your biology and evolution videos. I was raised in a conservative christian homeschool group and was never taught any biology other than creationism. As I’ve grown and learned outside knowledge and beliefs and all that your videos have been instrumental in helping me learn what I missed out on in my education.
Don't give up on faith. I am a Catholic and still accept evolution as a valid theory. My only change is guided evolution. God has all of eternity to make whatever he wants, so why not set into the first life forms the genetic plans to make every single thing?
@@droittjr I don't really know what I believe right now, but guided evolution is definitely a probability in my mind. I can't really believe in the version of god I was raised to believe in, but also don't think that everything could've happened so perfectly just by chance. Also, I definitely know that religion and evolution aren't mutually exclusive, but I was actually taught in our classes to ridicule anything that was based in, or anyone who believed in, evolution.
Welcome to a wider world! You have decades of learning cool stuff to catch up in, it´ll be fun!
@@droittjr why put forth a supernatural being as any part of the answer? where is the good evidence for it?
@@zhou_sei E do nada pode surgir alguma coisa? Você já viu o nada criar o tudo como diz a Ciência? E o acaso faz o que? O nada e o acaso são os deuses da ciência, você já se sentiu um produto do nada feito pelo acaso?
When discussing the extinction of Teilhardina brandti at 1:38, what is the point of showing us a photo of a couple of fingertips/fingernails?
They were also in Panama, north of the Central American Seaway by ~23 Ma
Evidence for rafting would be evidence of other plants/insects/animals from N Africa and that time period being found in S America -without land route evidence, especially so if large parts of the land route was inhospitable to those species.
The only animal groups I can think of that fit the bill are rodents or insects. But… preservation bias.
I live on the most southern monkey habitat in south America and absolutely love them. I knew nothing about this
Do we have information re why cattyrrhini don't have prehensile tails? Is it just that related mutation never happen to develop until after the Atlantic jump, or did differing selective pressure play a role, like are there more suspension vines in American forests vs Asiatic and African.
Good question!
Some interesting guesses. Keep working on it, Grasshopper.
A couple of things get my attention. Firstly, Libya and Egypt are in the Eastern Mediterranean, so is it suggested that these rafts went across North Africa before crossing the Atlantic? The other thing is those fossils were found quite far inland, so it probably took both species a while to spread that far inland, I understand that the Amazon rainforest wasn't established then, so I assume the area was mainly grasslands. Were there more trees than I imagined or were these just exceptionally lucky critters?...
You would be surprised. The Amazon rainforest is 55 million years old, and the Amazon river was flowing in the opposite direction originally.
That certainly helps explain how they got so far inland quite quickly...
The monkeys that lived in Egypt and Libya were probably widespread throughout Africa, but most of the continent doesn't have a good fossil record from that time period. They almost certainly weren't only living in that part of Africa.
As a geologist, I think it’s possible our record of tectonic movement has not recorded the rate of tectonic movement perfectly. For instance, there could be periods of times where the plates are moving at 2-3 times the speed they are today. I haven’t researched this, but I think it could certainly be possible. Meaning the raft journey could be even smaller, or something else.
That may be true, but there are two main branches of that theory. One is "catastrophism" or the idea that sudden events cause change. The other is "gradualism" which believes that rate of change is currently observable. Neither of them explain tectonic movement completely. Worse yet, the two theories are hard to reconcile.
Could there be an entire link between the older north american one and the modern south american ones? How many fossils of the older north american one were found? Riddled with them or just a couple dozen?
Ohooohh is this gonna go over the rafting theory?? I love it so much because it's a theory for so many animals and I think maybe even some non-animal species in the Americas hahha they just kinda lucked out rafting around on debris and plants it's great so hyped for this episode
there's a great book that I read avidly when it came out called 'Monkey's Voyage: How Improbable Journeys Shaped the History of Life' by
Alan De Queiroz which answers this question and goes into a lot of great detail about the primates. He's got a great style of writing too. I totally loved it and if you're interested in it you should definitely read it.
I was literally just thinking about this yesterday. I’m glad I’m not crazy
That was great. Thank you. But, I wish you had said how far Madagascar was and is from Africa.
its very similar to the origins of capybaras in south america, around the same time. maybe there was some kind of connection that don’t exist anymore.
are u sure it's about the capybaras? I heard it was about the peruvian chincilas, both are rodents, arent them? last month i rented an apartment at the beach in the south of brazil and in the street there was 3 capybaras, it's amazing!
@@rondonalves2897 São roedores da mesma família
It's cool how far technology has come that scientists can now travel back tens of millions of years to figure this stuff out.
Sarcasm? No, we don't have time travel, it is impossible.
@@DovidGershom My point exactly.
There had to be like string of island in between. I can't believe this 😆
Thank you!
I always thought that maybe the New World and Old World monkeys might have just developed independently, an example of convergent evolution, where separate lineages in similar environments ultimately agree on a phenotype that best fills the similar ecological niche. But what do I know.
DNA suggests that New World and Old World monkeys are each others closest relatives.
Exactly. Humans also evolved separately.
1:39 I know we have some spotty fossils, but ... is THIS the holotype?
Yeah. That fingernail pic is throwing me. How did they miss that in post?
It’s a photo of a couple of Teilhardina brandti fossils, pictured on a human’s fingernail for size reference.
@@rachelnotluf4585 A holotype is a single type specimen (fossil) upon which the description and name of a new species is based. I know it's a fossil. Is it THE fossil?
I know I don't get it! Methinks somebody put the wrong picture in there- lol
Yes. Those are fingertips of the mouse sized little guy.
What are those 2 things they are holding at 1:40?
Plate tectonics works for me! 😄
Saw the title and my instant reaction was "rafting." Which is how we got Lemurs in Madagascar
Edit: Watched the video and rafting is indeed the answer. And the lemurs were mentioned too. Unsurprised
Curiously, when human first came to Madagascar, it's not by rafting from Africa, but by ship from India.
@@gorilladisco9108 not India, Indonesia
Hurricanes and other storms often pick up dust from the Sahara and distribute it over the Amazon. Large powerful storms are known to have picked up creatures as large as locusts and frogs, and carried them quite far. Would it really be out of the question that small monkeys could have ended up swept by the wind and a couple survivors land close enough? Then again, Driftwood.
Landing from a height sufficient to cross the Atlantic wouldn't be pretty for something with the sectional density of a primate, i suspect.
I wonder if wooden ships surfed the hurricanes 🌀
I mean, you gotta figure, the monkeys would have to survive the temperature and the lower oxygen that far up, then somehow survive the fall back to the ground. Rafting is definitely the more likely scenario of the two unless they had parachutes.
I'm gonna need several "artist's renditions" of small primates rafting across the atlantic. Several.
"solid clue" ... Yep, that's a "sure bet" 🤣
Call me an ignorant man but, around the 1:30 mark we are shown a fingernail with two green globs on it… why, what is the significance, and how does it relate to monkeys being in the Americas?
I heard one even became president of Venezuela
I have no clue, but I remember that find of Hominids some months ago (but not modern humans afaik) that was dated to 130.000 years BC, in North America. A mere 100k years earlier than what was common sense before.
As someone interested in science in general, these questions are really interesting, because it shows that there is yet a lot to discover...
Any understanding of why George Simpson thought Teilhardina should be named for philosopher Teilhard de Chardin?
And there shouldn't be ants in my pants...
...but there ARE! 😭
😂🤣😂
Evict them or least tell them they don't belong there
It's interesting that Chile is the only country South America in which there are no native primates (apart from humans, of course). Probably the lack of the right climate (no tropical rain forests, for instance) and barriers like the desert of Atacama in the north and the massive Andes range in the east are good reasons.
humans are monkeys
They should have totally allowed you to make rafts in that video game Ancestors The humankind Odyssey.... That would have been really cool having your whole troop floating around on logs to get to the new location... Like the Great Lake location. Would be handy. Just fascinating to think about all this.
Well exactly how wide was the Atlantic at this time?
I was thinking about the East African Rift Valley and what it might be like if it splits off to form a new continent as has been projected by geologists. First, you will get a strait - currents aside - that one would be able to paddle across. Heck a tall tree falling over might bridge the two sides depending. And only after a long period of widening would the idea of floating across on a bunch of driftwood become too ridiculous.
Edit: Ah 4:36. Here is my problem with the raft idea though - Do we see this today? After a large typhoon has passed, is it the case that fishermen find masses of floating vegetation with live mammals clinging on for dear life? Cause a lone survivor isn't going to cut it. You need at least one breeding pair - more if different species are involved. Do we find countries with narrow salt water straits between them where mammals cross with regularity? At what width does this stop?
Very close in fact. 30 mya Africa's gold coast was so close to Brazil that the body of water between then is more of a straight than an ocean.
About the title:
Agreed 🤓
Agreed👴🏻
Or hippos
Those were Pablo rafts.
I was totally expecting a ton of evolution versus creation debates in this comments section.
One of the biggest problems I have with geology and paleontology is the probability of error in mathematical extrapolation. Also the notion of "if you eliminate all impossible solutions..." is true, than one might also expand what is viewed as possible.
The whole thing got me thinking about geological process, myself. I know more about the eastern US 400+ million years ago than I do about it today! Here, conditions for fossilization were very poor through most of the mezozoic, so most of the fossils you find are all late devonian or earlier. Obviously all of that is way earlier than any monkey journeys, but I just wonder if maybe they did cross the Behring Straight but for whatever reason conditions just weren't right for fossilization during the time period those journeys were happening? There's a lot of threads I wish this video had pulled on more. I wonder if anyone's done that type of paleogeological survey yet?
I think a basic raft is largely unrealistic like 2 or 3 trees. I'm thinking of a huge cyclone ripping thousands of trees out that are not unreasonable, considering Western Africa was very lush at the time. I wouldn't be surprised if some trees still had fruit on them and would allow a few to make the journey easily. Sargassum mixing with this would be very tolerable for any omnivores. Rodents and primates rafting across!
I seem to remember from my long ago college days (BA in 1964) that New World Monkey and Old World Monkeys have a key difference. One has a prehensile tail and the other doesn't.
I think the more significant difference is the structure of their nostrils. I think new world monkeys have a more ‘primitive’ dentition as well.
Like I said this was over 60 years ago. I remembered the tails, but not much else.
yeah that's a bit weird when it comes to the ocean travel theory
New world Monkeys have a different dentation. Old world 2/1/2/3 like humans...2 incisors, 1 fang, 2 pre molars and 3 molars. New world is 2/1/3/3. There are some other differences like claw v fingernails, but look them up...primates are interesting :)
There's actually only one family of Neotropical primates that has a fully prehensile tail - Atelidae (howler, spider, and woolley monkeys). The other 3 families do not have fully prehensile tails (capuchins, a genus within the cebidae family, though do have what is called semi-prehensile tails or tails that can only partially support their weight). The majority of south American primates do not have prehensile tails just like African primates!
-primatologist
Thank you
I think they flew. Hitched a ride with some albatrosses.
During the ice age, it's possible there could have been glaciers and ice shelves far enough north from Antarctica to cross at the southern tips without needing a raft.
Finding food and shelter along the way would be a whole different conversation, but certainly it would have been easier than just clinging to a piece of wood. Especially for enough of them to make it across to have a stable population.
Great hypothesis, but the the chronology doesn't match: The ice age started 2 million years ago. The monkeys are in South America more than 30 million years ago.
@@eljanrimsa5843 There was more than one ice age.
@@jameshill2450 That is true, the last one before the most current one ended 289 million years ago. Antarctica was free of ice 35 million years ago, then the first glaciers were forming, and gradually growing to about its current extent 2 million years ago, when the intermittent deep glaciation periods began. 30 million years ago there were three ice caps in the higher altitudes on Antarctica but no continuous ice shield and no sea ice.
1:25 what map/globe is that??
In this scishow episode Wild Guesses.
Yet there are... And they vote for lula
Stop calling the natives monkeys, omg
4:38 would be awesome if you included the equivalent in meters in places like this 😬
The swallow may fly south with the sun or the house martin or the plover may seek warmer climes in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land.
Miles? Nobody does science in miles. Anyone on UA-cam nowadays watching a science video is definitely familiar with *kilometers.* Even for us Americans there’s no need to use *miles* in this context.
i know right! i cringe every time I see a science channel using imperial or F in their videos 😂
They use miles specifically for the purpose of seeing the butthurt comments.
Science? This is infotainment, and, yes, Americans do visualize distances in miles (or feet) and temperatures in Fahrenheit, though I have always voted for Rankine.
@@erikjohnson9223 You're obviously not in STEM. Many Americans work with metric and have no problem visualizing distances in kilometers. You struggling with kilometers is not nearly as important as improving numeracy of the viewers of this video who plan to go into STEM fields. Using imperial harms our competitiveness and economy.
@@DemPilafian Re-read. I studied Chemical Engineering, and generally do math in S.I. because I happen to like base 10. (I still prefer Rankine temperatures because the units are narrower.) That doesn't make me opposed to reporting in other units, nor does it make S.I. units mandatory for *infotainment*, where the goal is education (& entertainment), generally of younger and non "STEM" audiences. (I happen to dislike the "STEM" label, b/c I have seen lazy/dumb "educators" use that jargon to weasel out of teaching statistics and the Scientific Method in favor of doing some dumbed down engineering/construction project that sounds "high tech" but tests nothing, or even "The Science" [in the horrific, Fauci-esq, listen-to-the-experts, oracular, recieved-wisdom sense that is not science at all but rather intellectual malpractice]). Sci-Show is infotainment, not a scientific journal. That you may be a moron does not imply that others are also.
Thanks a lot
Another video mentioned this too. So bizarre. In what time frame would the “rafting” have occurred, and did any other species magically appear from Africa to South America in that time?
So when I looked it up, the monkeys arrived on South America 30mya at earliest, which is the Eocene period. If you can find other articles referencing some kind of jump in biodiversity during that time you'll have at least a partial answer.
The introduction sounded like you was talking about the brothers 👀😂
The difference in continental drift is astounding over those millions of years. I believe it could be done, but who knows what weathers patterns were like back then.
Also, imagine an alien species observing that monkeys were wiped out of the Americas. Then they re-introduced them to the southern continent petri-dish style
3:39 - where is New Zealand?