When Apes Conquered Europe

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to http://to.pbs.org/DonateEons ↓ More info below ↓ Today, our closest evolutionary relatives, the apes, live only in small pockets of Africa and Asia. But back in the Miocene epoch, apes occupied all of Europe. Why aren’t there wild apes in Europe today? Special thanks to https://AfricanFossils.org for allowing us to use their images of Proconsul and Ekembo fossils. Produced for PBS Digital Studios. Super special thanks to the following Patreon patrons for helping make Eons possible: Katie Fichtner, Anthony Callaghan, Neil H. Gray, Marilyn Wolmart, Esmeralda Rupp-Spangle, Gregory Donovan, Ehit Dinesh Agarwal, سلطان الخليفي, Gabriel Cortez, Marcus Lejon, Anel Salas, Robert Arévalo, Robert Hill, Kelby Reid, Todd Dittman, Betsy Radley, PS, Colin Sylvester, Philip Slingerland, John Vanek, Jose Garcia, Eric Vonk, Tony Wamsley, Henrik Peteri, Jonathan Wright, Jon Monteiro, James Bording, Brad Nicholls, Miles Chaston, Michael McClellan, Jeff Graham, Maria Humphrey, Nathan Paskett, Connor Jensen, Sapjes, Daisuke Goto, Hubert Rady, Yuntao Zhou, Gregory Kintz, Tyson Cleary, Chandler Bass, Maly Lor, Joao Ascensao, Tsee Lee, Sarah Fritts, Ruben Winter, Ron Harvey Jr, Jacob Gerke, Alex Yan If you d like to support the channel, head over to http://patreon.com/eons and pledge for some cool rewards! Want to follow Eons elsewhere on the internet? Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/eonsshow Twitter - https://twitter.com/eonsshow Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/eonsshow/ References: https://anthropology.utoronto.ca/Faculty/Begun/begunSciAm.pdf https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/effects-of-climate-change-on-primate-evolution-141807385 http://humanorigins.si.edu/research/climate-and-human-evolution/climate-effects-human-evolution http://johnhawks.net/weblog/fossils/miocene/graecopithecus/graecopithecus-fuss-2017.html https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=qBoqAAAAIBAJ&sjid=oyYEAAAAIBAJ&pg=2472,5867929&dq=oreopithecus&hl=en https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/human-evolutions-cookie-monster-oreopithecus-1657956/ http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/14529649 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23280922 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/350/6260/aab2625 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28012461 https://www.nature.com/articles/382349a0 https://anthropology.utoronto.ca/Faculty/Begun/handbook.pdf https://anthropology.utoronto.ca/Faculty/Begun/cranial%20evid%20intell.pdf http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0038-23532017000700003 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0177347 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3078397/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248486800719 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24242778 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0177127 https://www.sajs.co.za/article/view/5149 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/327/5965/532 https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article/43/2/123/131763/global-perturbation-of-the-carbon-cycle-at-the https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/88f2/1ff1b2196d32f1d2c90cbcc199c69e0cb4bb.pdf http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.2110/palo.2004.p04-17 http://sciencepress.mnhn.fr/en/periodiques/geodiversitas/29/3/analyse-de-la-micro-usure-dentaire-des-bovides-du-vallesien-miocene-superieur-de-la-vallee-de-l-axios-en-grece-reconstitution-de-l-habitat-d-ouranopithecus-macedoniensis-primates-hominoidea https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248415000767 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26932906 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12069506 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248411002144 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23473739 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11333976