Monkeys first came to the Americas on vegetation rafts
Or on spaceships.
No, actually it was vegetation rafts.
I kid you not:
Primates came to the New World (meaning North and South America) from, we think, Africa. As improbable as it sounds, scientists think early primates crossed the Atlantic Ocean and landed on the shores of both continents tens of millions of years ago, probably on some kind of vegetation raft…Fossils have been recovered of early primates in Texas a whopping 43 million years ago, the oldest primate fossil ever found in North America. But the continents looked very different then, compared to now; most importantly, North and South America were completely different islands. The Isthmus of Panama, which we now refer to as Central America, didn’t appear until much later, by which time the climate on both Americas was very different from when the primates first landed there.
When they did first land here, the climate was much warmer than it is now, and the primates evolved and diversified to take advantage of that…Then the planet began to cool, and cool quickly. Forests died out. The poles covered with ice. Many of the flora and fauna that had populated the planet during the Eocene just couldn’t survive in the new, colder world. This event is called the Grande Coupure–occurring about 33.9 million years ago, it was a mass extinction of animals, in which most of the world’s creatures (aside from a precious few, like the Virginia opossum and the dormouse) were unable to adapt to the new climate and perished. It hit the primate family especially hard. In the New World, the primate population shrunk significantly. Any primate living in, say, the Great Lakes region simply went extinct, unable to cope with the new Wisconsin winters.
In South America, the primates contracted to the region around the equator.
Those New World monkey survivors all occupy a particular niche: they are arboreal tropical-forest dwellers. Some of them journeyed back up to Central America later, when the isthmus connected the continents, but were stopped by the deserts in Mexico.
I keep trying to picture those monkeys on those rafts, though. What did they eat? How did they survive? It seems so improbable. And yet I found a Wiki entry dealing with the general phenomenon, entitled “oceanic dispersal.” These “rafts” are not the Huckleberry Finn variety—they are big.
Here’s an article on how rafting works, although it doesn’t go into the monkey story. But it describes a large raft (20-meter by 6-meter by 2-meter) that came to Oregon from Japan after the 2011 earthquake tsunami, which had to be dealt with because it constituted a threat to the Oregon coastal ecosystem.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
[Hat tip: Ace’s.]
Well, I’ll be their uncle…
Strange that humans later (but earlier than Columbus) took the longer but less watery way through the Bering Strait. The seas must have been inordinately calm for the monkeys to have made it. Columbus’s caravels were strong compared to earlier ships, but it was still a dicey proposition in his time.
This could just be another case of scientists who are running out of money monkeying around.
Yeah sure, file that one right beside
*Global climate change*
I wonder if people have traveled on those. I wonder if that’s how the aborigines got to Australia. (I am no anthropologist but read something once to the effect that nobody knows for sure how that happened — correct me if that’s wrong, please.)
I recall reading in an account of the aftermath of the Krakatoa eruption that mariners spotted quite a few huge natural rafts in the ocean waters some distance from the explosion; immense tangles of pumice, trees and jungle foliage with quite a few animals and now and again a human skeleton on them.
It’s interesting that the very same scientists who completely discredit the Biblical account of creation can turn around and come up with stories like this.
I can’t prove or disprove 7-day creation. Nor can I prove or disprove 43 million year old raft-sailing monkeys. But that’s the point. The scientists can’t prove or disprove them either. But Scientists completely discredit the former while completely presenting multi-million-year history of the Earth as Known Fact.
It worth to mention that the climate 43 mln years ago was much hotter than in our times. The appearance of Panama Isthmus changed ocean circulation tremendously and cooled land temperature by 10 C on average. This happened only 3.5 mln years ago, and before that there were no deserts in Mexico.
How far apart were Africa and S America 43 million years ago?
Continental Drift is glacially slow, but given 43 million years the South Atlantic might not have been very wide at the time.
I might have gone the whole day and not thought about monkeys on this hemisphere and rafts and millions of years and rafting monkeys and stuff like that. However I did soldier with some Special Forces guys who trained in Panama in the 1960’s and they were supposed to learn how to skin and eat monkeys.
I was told that it was not a good thing to eat Monkeys because they look real bad skinned and they don’t taste like chicken. Up to this very day that was all I know about monkeys in the Americas.
Thanks for the monkey and raft information and maybe that is where Bigfoot came from.
I try not to mock other people’s religious beliefs, but that monkey story cracks me up.
It’s a crazy idea. That may be the best thing it has going for it.
The final breakdown of Gondvana happened about 70-80 mln years ago, millions years before extinction of dinosaurs. So Africa and South America had an ample time to drift apart before monkey’s ocean journey. Atlantic ocean was at this time almost as wide as it is now.
Humans travelled to America when ocean level was 130 m lower than now. There were no Bering Strait, but instead there was a wide land bridge called Beringia. Alaska and Siberia were well connected. This bridge was flooded only after deglaciation around 18 000 years ago.