An extinct, ape-like animal that researchers believe was a distant cousin of humans probably evolved in Asia, instead of Africa, according to a recent study. The finding suggests that anthropoid primates — a suborder including apes, monkeys and humans — evolved in Asia before radiating to Africa, where the earliest humans have been identified. Researchers made the determination after analyzing an anklebone found in the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar, formerly Burma. The 37-million-year-old bone likely belonged to an anthropoid species known as Amphipithecus, a large animal that leaped and climbed in the trees where it lived. Findings are published in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Before the study, scientists were not sure if the bone belonged to an adapiform or an anthropoid primate. Though also in the ape family, the now-extinct adapiforms were more likely closely related to today's lemurs and lorises than to chimps and humans. The size, dimensions and other features of the bone make it more structurally similar to anthropoids, according to the recent study. Since this bone, and other early primate fossils, appears to come from anatomically advanced creatures, anthropoids probably originated in Asia at least 55 million years ago, about 50 million years before humans began to appear.

"The amphipithecid primates represent one of the first offshoots of our evolutionary history, clearly distinct from that of lemurs and lorises," said Laurent Marivaux, lead author of the PNAS paper and a paleontologist at the Université Montpellier II in France. "Amphipithecids could be viewed as our very old, distant cousins."

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