Your 52-million-year-old ancestor may have been better than you at long jump

Apparently, our ancestors may have been high-flying acrobats – according to scientists who deduced this by analysing an ankle fossil believed to be 52 million years old.

The bone, found in a quarry in southeastern France, is quarter-inch-long and forms the lower part of the ankle joint belonging to an ancient creature called Donrussellia provincialis.

One of the earliest members of the primate family tree and ancestors of today’s humans, monkeys and apes, the Donrussellia is on the branch leading to lemurs, lorises and bush babies.

The general scientific consensus is that these creatures, who were the size of a chipmunk, spent most of their time on trees but we do not know how exactly they moved around.

But now palaeontologists believe that the newly found fossil might prove otherwise and that these ancient creatures may have been masters at the long jump leaping through trees.

Until now, the species have only been identified from jaws and teeth and when Duke University assistant professor Doug Boyer and colleagues compared the Donrussellia’s ankle to other animals, they found that it was, surprisingly, more similar to those of treeshrews and other nonprimate species.

“Being able to jump from one tree to another might have been important, especially if there were ground predators around waiting to snag them,” Boyer said.

The study is published in the Journal of Human Evolution.