"Wooded grasslands flourished in Africa 21 million years..." Topic

… ago – new research forces a rethink of ape evolution

"Human evolution is tightly connected to the environment and landscape of Africa, where our ancestors first emerged.

According to the traditional scientific narrative, Africa was once a verdant idyll of vast forests stretching from coast to coast. In these lush habitats, around 21 million years ago, the earliest ancestors of apes and humans first evolved traits – including upright posture – that distinguished them from their monkey cousins.

But then, the story went, global climates cooled and dried, and forests began to shrink. By about 10 million years ago, grasses and shrubs that were better able to tolerate the increasingly dry conditions started to take over eastern Africa, replacing forests. The earliest hominins, our distant ancestors, ventured out of the forest remnants that had been home onto the grass-covered savanna. The idea was that this new ecosystem pushed a radical change for our lineage: We became bipedal…"

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Armand

‘Surprisingly Large' Extinct Lemurs Shows Fascinating Similarities To Human Fossils

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Armand

Ecosystem evolution in Africa

"Collaborating with an extensive team of geologists and paleoanthropologists from universities around the world, led by researchers from Baylor University and the University of Minnesota, the team synthesized data from nine Early Miocene fossil localities in the East African Rift of Kenya and Uganda to determine that the expansion of grassy biomes dominated by grasses with the C4 photosynthetic pathway in Eastern Africa occurred more than 10 million years earlier…."

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There exists compelling evidence for global changes at around the same time. The northern hemisphere developed an ecosystem today known as "mammoth steppe" of mixed grassland/woodland that disappeared with the retreat of the ice sheets and the advance of forests to the north. This may have contributed to the extinction of many Pleistocene mammals.

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Armand