A 17-Million-Year-Old Jawbone Just Rewrote Where Apes Came From

A team led by Hesham Sallam of the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center in Egypt, working with researchers from the University of Southern California, has described a newly identified fossil ape from the Wadi Moghra region of northern Egypt. The find, published July 24, 2026, in the journal Science, is the first definitive fossil ape ever recovered from North Africa, and it's pushing scientists to reconsider where the ancestors of today's apes, and eventually humans, first took shape.

The fossil, a lower jaw fragment recovered during fieldwork in 2023 and 2024, belongs to a newly named species, Masripithecus moghraensis, which lived roughly 17 to 18 million years ago during the Early Miocene. The jaw carries unusually large canine and premolar teeth alongside molars with rounded, textured surfaces, evidence of a flexible, mostly fruit-based diet that could still handle harder foods like nuts or seeds when needed. Comparative analysis places Masripithecus closer to living apes than any East African species of comparable age, the region long assumed to be the sole cradle of ape evolution.

That's the significance researchers are pointing to: for decades, the story of ape origins has centered almost entirely on East Africa's Rift Valley fossil beds. A single jaw from Egypt won't rewrite the textbooks on its own, but it's strong enough evidence to put North Africa and the Middle East back on the map as a plausible crossroads for the lineage that eventually produced gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and us.

Every fossil, whether it's a 17-million-year-old jawbone or a coiled ammonite shell, is doing the same basic job: holding a snapshot of ancient life still enough for us to study it millions of years later. Our own fossil specimens carry that same appeal on a smaller scale, see pieces like this large ammolite specimen with an exposed spiral cross-section or this set of polished ammonite spiral fossil pairs, each one a genuine window into a world long gone.

Source: ScienceDaily, July 2026.

Written by Nic Scogna, a photographer and mineral collector based in Lexington, Kentucky, and the founder of Crystal Earth Gallery and Kyanite King Minerals. For over 25 years, he has traveled to mineral localities across the U.S. — from Maine to California — personally sourcing the specimens, gemstones, and photographic subjects featured here. When not out in the field, Nic writes about mineralogy, collecting, and the craft of turning raw stone into wearable art.