20 million year old primate skull discovered in Uganda  This is
our first, somewhat blurry look at Ugandapithecus major, a
primate that lived in ancient Uganda 20 million years ago. It's
one of the oldest primate fossils ever found, and it could hold
crucial information about our evolutionary past.  The skull was
discovered by a joint team of French and Uganda paleontologists
in the country's Karamoja region, in the Northeast. Although
it's still early days in terms of what we can learn about this
primate, we do know that it was a tree-climbing herbivore, it
was about as big as a chimpanzee but had a smaller brain, and it
was about ten years old when it died all those eons ago.
Paleontologist Martin Pickford commented on his team's
discovery:   To put the primate's age into some perspective,
twenty million years ago long predates when our hominid
ancestors became distinct from chimpanzees. Indeed, this primate
appears to have lived right in the middle between the divergence
of apes from Old World monkeys 25