This 13 million-year-old skull is the most preserved fossil of primates ever discovered and offers unprecedented details of how the true apes have become humans.

An international group of experts has just found what Kin has to date (2014 finding) is considered to be the least affected 13 of the million-year old fossilized primate skull. The new finding could help the experts to illuminate the common evolutionary heritage between apes and humans. In other words, this skull 13 for millions of years could help experts understand how the apes became people.

Lemon-sized remains correspond to a child aged less than a year and four months old and belongs to the newly-named species that lived before 13 for millions of years, during the epoch of Miocene - the time when monkeys began to spread to Eurasia. It is assumed that during the Miocene - a period that lasted from 5 million to 25 million years - there were more than 40 of different hominid species.

Researchers called a new species Nyanzapithecus Alesi, where "alesi" means (in the language of the Kenyan Turkana tribe) "ancestor". The mysterious creature has nothing to do with humans or apes and may have looked like our ancient lost ancestors. Experts point out that this new skull has a very small snout - similar to the gibbons, but a scan revealed that the creature had ear tubes that are closer to chimpanzees and humans.

To better understand the skull, it was subjected to an extremely sensitive form of 3D X-rays, which helped scientists understand more about its age, species and overall characteristics. "Gibbon are well known for their rapid and acrobatic movement in the trees," said Fred Spoor, a professor of evolutionary anatomy at University College London. "But Alesi's inner ears show that they were able to move around more carefully."

The newly found skull is considered to be the most complete monkey of the deceased species in the fossil record. Experts believe that humans deviated from apes about six million years later, meaning that humans shared their last common ancestor with chimpanzees 7 million years ago. Lead author Dr. Isaiah Nengo of Stony Brook University said: “Nyanzapithecus Alesi was part of a group of primates that lived in Africa for about 10 million years. The discovery of the species Alesi proves that this group was close to the origins of human apes and humans and that this origin was African. Co-author Craig Feibel, professor of geology and anthropology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, added: “The Napudet site offers us a rare insight into the African landscape thirty million years ago. A nearby volcano buried the forest where the monkey lived, preserving fossils and countless trees. It also preserved important volcanic minerals that allowed us to date the age of the fossils. "

The study was published in Nature (2017). The new study was sponsored by several institutions, such as the Leakey Foundation and Gordon Getty, the Foothill-De Anza Foundation, the Fulbright Scholars Program, the National Geographic Society, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, and Max Planck.