Miocene

That fossil is about 14 million years old.

Middle Miocene, long before there were human beings anywhere on Earth.

Why this rewrites the history book.

Until that moment, every known honeybee fossil came from Asia or Europe.

Okay.

However, the earliest fossils are from the Miocene, and I mostly work in the Oligocene.

So I'm really working, like, 15 million years too early for a skunk.

You're looking for grandpa.

In the Leucan formation where we found Ourorin, we also found other mammals such as elephants, horses, hippopotamus, pigs and so on.

And by the evolutionary stage of those creatures, those fossils, we can also guess the age, and as soon as we found Aurarin, we looked around and found other fossils, and we could say straight away, yeah, this is late Miocene age, so it's gotta be around about six million years.

The fossilized remains of these animals and...

Low energy? Unfocused? Foggy? You might be dehydrated.

you could give australia another one hundred million years of perfect conditions and it still wouldn't evolve humans independently because the basic genetic architecture isn't there to work with but all of this raises a deeper question Why did only Africa have the right primates to begin with? This is where we need to talk about the primate prerequisite, and it takes us back even further in time.

Around 23 to 5 million years ago, during the Miocene Epoch, Africa experienced something unique.

A combination of climate conditions, forest coverage, and geographic positioning that allowed primates to diversify in ways they couldn't anywhere else.

the continent had extensive tropical forests that provided the complex three-dimensional environment where primate traits like grasping hands stereoscopic vision and large brains first evolved but it also had enough climatic variability to create selection pressure for adaptability rather than overspecialization This created what evolutionary biologists call an adaptive radiation.

But in time, natural selection adapted and refined its evolutionary blueprint into one of the largest and fiercest marine hunters that has ever roamed the seas, the infamous mega-tooth shark, the megalodon.

[gentle music] Megalodon is thought to have lived for a relatively brief period between 3 million and 23 million years ago, from the early Miocene to the Pliocene.

In that time, this apex predator's tyranny spread throughout the globe, with its fossils found on every continent today, including Antarctica.

The overwhelming majority of these fossils are its gargantuan teeth.

Tropical preservation conditions prevented it from forming.

geological upheaval buried it or tilted it or fractured it until it became unreadable we are left with a crucial period in earth's history that we can only partially reconstruct a climate transition we desperately need to understand but can't fully explain the eocene stands as a massive gap in our understanding of how earth's climate and ecosystems function under extreme conditions twenty-two million years of hot-house conditions that produced life-forms we can barely imagine and then wiped them away in a geological instant a period when palm trees grew at the poles and crocodiles swam in arctic rivers when bizarre mammal lineages rose and fell without leaving clear explanations for their existence and perhaps most importantly a period that contained the evolutionary origins of our own lineage somewhere in those eocene rainforests among those fragmentary fossils and massive gaps in the record our ancestors were evolving the characteristics that would eventually make humans possible enhanced vision grasping hands larger brains social complexity the foundations of human evolution were being laid and we can barely see it happening because the earth itself has erased the evidence leaving us with questions we may never fully answer now we need to talk about one of the most frustrating periods in earth's entire history not because nothing happened but because almost everything that happened left virtually no trace Welcome to the Oligocene and Miocene epochs, 34 million to 5 million years ago, nearly 30 million years of Earth history that should be absolutely packed with answers to our biggest evolutionary questions.

Instead, it's like someone took the most important chapters of Earth's autobiography and fed them through a shredder.

Here's what we know was happening during this time.

What we have instead are snapshots.

brief windows into this thirty million year period separated by enormous gaps.

We have forest ecosystems from the early Oligocene, then millions of years of nothing, then suddenly in the late Miocene we have vast grasslands with completely different animal communities.

The transition between them, the actual process of transformation, is largely missing.