Scientists have found a wonderfully preserved skull fragment of the oldest baboon species in a South African cave. They didn’t find any other non-hominid animal apart from the ancient baboon in the cave. Archaeologists and anthropologists have done a lot of work on this site in Malapa as it had a massive population of a variety of hominid species across millions of years.

This site was the same place where a distinct hominid species, Australopithecus sediba, was discovered by the scientists for the first time.

Scientists studied the skull of Papio angusticeps, the new baboon ancestor discovered at the UNESCO World Heritage site. They found that it is noticeably similar to modern baboon. According to scientists, if they didn’t have been very slight physiological differences, the two could have been easily called identical.

An anthropologist at Hunter College in New York and one of the study authors Christopher C. Gilbert said that the findings will be helpful in dating other ancient baboon fossils discovered in other places. He added that eventually, they might identify the complete baboon lineage.

As for now, scientists don’t know much about baboon ancestry. According to Genome sequencing research, baboons appeared for the first time when they got split from a common ancestor around two million years ago. The P. sediba fossils are dated around the same time, which lends credibility to this theory.