Fig. 1

Evolutionary relationships among living apes and humans. The timeline charts major splitting events (large bullets) between ape lineages, which are taken from Raaum et al. (2005) and references therein. Fossil apes featured in the text are also plotted with lines approximating their temporal ranges in the fossil record (Begun 2007; Benefit and McCrossin 1995; Heizmann and Begun 2001; MacLatchy et al. 2006; Peppe et al. 2009). Shaded regions correspond to the phylogeographic groups discussed in the text, and their placement across major splitting events represents both current debates over the relationships of their constituent taxa as well as, in some cases, the likelihood that these convenient geo-temporal groups comprise members of multiple evolutionary lineages. Shaded regions are not calibrated to the timescale