25 Gramme Primate

The girls and I recently watched History of the World in Two Hours - from gases & molten lava... to tiny micro-organisms... to us. All in 88 mins - once you've cut the ads (it was originally made for US TV...). It's sort of National Geographic meets David Attenborough - all very melodramatic, but then how could it not be!? Amazing to think that 'us' represents something like 0.003% of the Earth's lifespan (150,000 out of 4,540,000,000 years). 
So now we know how & when things came out of the sea and started walking about on land. And there's a China connection. It was announced this week that the world's oldest (55 million years) fossil primate skeleton has just been dug up in Hubei province. It's an Archicebus Achilles (see pic) and was tiny, about 25 grammes. The discovery adds further support to the hypothesis that primates originated in Asia, and not in Africa. So there you go.