Mosaic Evolution in the Origin of the Hominoidea

The initial appearance of hominoids, or apes, and the selective pressures that led to their emergence are currently disputed. Central to the argument are the proconsulids, variously described as the earliest apes or as stem catarrhines, based on facial and postcranial data, respectively. The present paper reports on incongruence and parsimony analyses applied to a combined data set. The results demonstrate that proconsulids are cladistic hominoids, and that the apparent incongruence between the data sets is due to mosaic evolution; the earliest changes in Hominoidea occurred in the face. These results suggest that the initial divergence of hominoids involved selection for an ape-like face, and was not driven by an adaptive shift to below-branch locomotion.