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Lemurs are primates native only to Madagascar today, but there is strong fossil evidence that lemur-like primates once lived in both Madagascar and India. The explanation lies in ancient geology and evolutionary history.
🌍 How Lemurs Ended Up in Both Madagascar and India
🧬 1. Common Ancestry on Ancient Supercontinent Gondwana
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Around 150–160 million years ago, Madagascar, India, Africa, and Antarctica were part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana.
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Early primate ancestors may have been distributed across this connected landmass.
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As Gondwana broke apart, India and Madagascar drifted away, possibly carrying early primate lineages with them.
🦴 2. Fossil Lemur Relatives in India
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Fossils of adapiforms, extinct primates resembling lemurs, have been found in India.
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These fossils suggest a shared lineage between Indian and Malagasy primates from over 50 million years ago.
🌊 3. Rafting Theory: Madagascar Colonization
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After India split from Madagascar (~88 million years ago), Madagascar became isolated.
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Lemurs likely reached Madagascar from Africa around 50–60 million years ago by rafting on mats of vegetation across the Mozambique Channel.
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This is supported by genetic data and the absence of other primates in Madagascar.
🌐 4. India as a 'Stepping Stone'
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Some hypotheses suggest that India, during its northward drift, acted as a “stepping stone” for species migrating from Africa to Asia (or vice versa), possibly carrying primate species including early lemur relatives.
🔍 In Summary:
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India and Madagascar shared early primate ancestors during Gondwana times.
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Lemurs likely reached Madagascar via rafting from Africa, not directly from India.
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Fossil lemur relatives in India reflect a shared evolutionary history, not modern-day lemur migration.
Would you like a visual map or timeline to help illustrate this evolutionary journey?
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the fact that men are more interested in casual sex doesn’t
imply that women are not interested. Many are, and most evolutionary
psychologists argue that casual sex was sometimes adaptive for women in
our ancestral past. Casual mates may have provided meat or other
resources, they may have helped out with the kids, or they may have had
better genes than the guy who was willing to get serious.61 But racking up
sexual conquests didn’t boost women’s fitness in the immediate and
powerful way that it did for men. We shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, that
on average, women today are less interested than men in racking up sexual
conquests. Moreover, given that even a single roll in the hay could
potentially have saddled a woman with a nine-month pregnancy and several
years of childcare duties, we shouldn’t be surprised that women have higher
standards than men for casual sexual partners. Madonna once described
herself as “selectively promiscuous.” This is probably a good description of
most women’s approach to casual sex (the occasional drunken mistake
notwithstanding).62
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Women’s preference for
wealthy, high-status mates is plausibly part of the answer. While men were
busy breeding better-looking women, women were breeding men with a
hunger for status and resources.103 This in turn may be part of the reason
that men are better represented in the upper echelons of society: better
represented among CEOs and politicians, for instance, and better
represented among the people who work eighty-hour weeks and rake in
impossibly large salaries. No doubt, other factors help to shape the
occupational landscape. But status motivation is quite possibly an important
piece of the puzzle, and ancestral women’s sexual choices may help to
explain the sex difference in this domain.
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