A lower jaw dug out of the Egyptian desert is reshaping the story of where living apes came from. Researchers say it belongs to Masripithecus moghraensis, a new species that lived 17 to 18 million years ago and is the first definitive fossil ape ever found in North Africa.The study comes from a team at Mansoura University’s Vertebrate Paleontology Center in Egypt and the University of Southern California. The fossil was recovered at Wadi Moghra in northern Egypt during fieldwork in 2023 and 2024.A gap in the ape fossil recordUntil now, Early Miocene sites in North Africa had produced monkeys but no apes, so early apes and their close relatives were thought to be confined mostly to more southern parts of Africa. Younger ape fossils turn up in Africa, Asia and Europe, but how they are related, and where they started, is debated.“When we look closely at the early ape family tree, it becomes clear that something is missing,” said Hesham Sallam, the study’s senior author, who spent five years searching for this kind of fossil.The genus name combines “Masr,” Arabic for Egypt, with the Greek word for ape. The species name honors Wadi Moghra.A jaw built for versatilityOnly the lower jaw survives, but it preserves an unusual set of features: very large canine and premolar teeth, molars with rounded, heavily textured chewing surfaces and a notably robust jaw. The team reads that as a flexible eater, mainly of fruit but able to handle harder foods such as nuts or seeds.Shorouq Al-Ashqar, a first author, said that flexibility would have helped the animal thrive as climate change made northern Africa and Arabia more seasonal.Closer to living apesUsing Bayesian methods, the researchers combined anatomy from living and extinct apes, DNA from living apes and the geological ages of fossil species to work out how they relate and when they split. They found that Masripithecus is more closely related to living apes than any Early Miocene species known from East Africa.A corridor between continentsSeparate analyses of where species lived point to northern Africa and the Middle East as the likeliest home of the last common ancestor of all living apes, from gibbons and orangutans to gorillas, chimpanzees and humans.At the time, the African and Arabian plates were moving north in their final collision with Asia, and shifting sea levels periodically lowered marine barriers, turning the region into a natural corridor for animals. Masripithecus links the previously separate African and Eurasian fossil records, the team says, showing that apes were already diversifying there and were positioned to spread into Europe and Asia once land connections opened.A rethink for the fieldErik Seiffert, a USC paleontologist and co-author, said he long assumed the common ancestor lived in or near East Africa, and that the new fossil and analyses now strongly challenge that idea. The scenario doesn’t depend on Masripithecus, he said, but it is consistent with it.The researchers expect renewed exploration of the region to turn up more fossils. Key chapters of our evolutionary history, they suggest, may lie in places that have yet to be fully explored.The study was first published in the journal Science,