Introduction

During the early part of this century, when fossil apes were first discovered it was common practice to try to find links between them and the living apes. This tendency was effectively halted by the 1965 review of Simons and Pilbeam, who grouped almost all known fossil apes into a single clade which they called Dryopithecus, sinking numerous genera previously recognised into just three subgenera of Dryopithecus. On the other hand, these authors did support the link between what was then called Ramapithecus and the line leading to modern humans (Simons & Pilbeam, 1965).

More recently, the discovery of new fossil ape specimens has led to renewed suggestions of a direct relationship between fossil and recent apes. The first of these proposed a link between Sivapithecus and the orang-utan based on characters of the face (Andrews & Cronin, 1982) and skull (Ward & Pilbeam, 1983). One decade later, new material of Dryopithecus led to the suggestion that this genus was more closely related to the African apes than were other fossil apes (Begun, 1992), and an even closer relationship was suggested between Graecopithecus (referred to as Ouranopithecus) and hominines by de Bonis & Koufos (1993). Meanwhile the supposed relationship between Ramapithecus (now Sivapithecus) and humans had effectively been denied by its inclusion in the genus Sivapithecus. The only one of these proposed sets of relationships to find full support in a recent review of hominoid evolution (Andrews, 1992) was that linking Sivapithecus with the orang-utan, but even for this there is contrary evidence provided by recent discoveries of postcranial bones (Pilbeam et al., 1990).