Climate change made apes vanish in ancient Europe

Great apes were swept away in the old Europe, when their environment changed dramatically around nine million years ago, scientists say.

A study of fossil teeth of grazing animals sheds light on what Europe was like during the late Miocene.

Researchers say that changes in European climate and the environment at the time replaced by many forests with grasslands - apes and monkey.

The scientists described their findings in a Royal Society Journal.

Ancient relatives of modern orang-utans, gorillas, chimpanzees and gibbons were able to survive in Asia and Africa, where these changes are not as drastic.

A team led by Dr. Claude Bernard Lyon Gildas Mercerón of a University in France, looked at fossil teeth of ancient antelope that lived alongside monkeys during the Miocene epoch - in what is now Germany, Hungary and Greece.

The researchers tried to determine what these animals ate millions of years ago.

"The best way to reconstructing the past environment is to determine the types of vegetarian diets. Here we used fossils of antelopes, because these animals dominated the fauna in Europe at the moment," Dr. Mercerón told BBC News.

The scientists then analyzed "micro scars" - the specific pattern of wear, indicating that the researchers clues about the animals' diet - in the teeth of this antelope.

They found that when these mammals on land shared with great apes, the landscape was very different from Europe became gradually.

The change does not happen overnight - it took thousands of years, says Dr. Mercerón. But when the monkeys' natural habitat change and forests disappeared, the animals slowly became extinct in Europe.

Monkeys were eventually replaced by their smaller cousins - a species of monkey called Mesopithecus, said the researcher.
Risk of extinction

Today, humans can cause changes in the environment much faster than what happened millions of years ago. People must become aware of their negative impact on the animal world, said Dr. Mercerón.
"If we cut down our forests and dry swamps, in the end we can make a very uniform environment and a decline in biodiversity", says the scientist.

"Deforestation leads to possible isolation of different populations of great apes in small woods. If their isolation, it becomes impossible for them to have a genetic exchange between populations - and the population started to decline."

Numbers of monkeys now living have fallen sharply in recent years. Elevated levels of poaching and deforestation are considered the main factors for the decline.

Many species are endangered - only about 6,000 Sumatran orangutans and so little about 700 mountain gorillas are thought to remain in the wild.

But there's more, says Dr. Mercerón's colleague, Dr. Ellen Schulz of the University of Hamburg in Germany.

"Great apes are threatened with extinction, mainly because the human habitat destruction," she said.

"But there is something else - people tend to forget that the conservation of biodiversity important for their own survival and - we never know what awaits us in the future."