Earliest modern baboon

The earliest-recorded specimen of a modern baboon is a fossilized partial skull of a baboon specimen dating back to between 2.026 and 2.36 million years but believed to belong to the present-day species known as the hamadryas or sacred baboon Papio hamadryas. It was found at Malapa, in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, not far from Johannesburg, South Africa, by a team of researchers from the Evolutionary Studies Institute at South Africa's Wits University. They formally published their research concerning it in August 2015.

Prior to this discovery, other baboon remains had been found that had been assigned to a prehistoric baboon species, P. angusticeps, but some researchers had speculated that this latter species may in reality have been nothing more than an early representative of the modern-day hamadryad baboon rather than a separate species in its own right. And when this skull was discovered and compared with those from the two species, it was found to compare precisely with both, thereby confirming that the two were indeed one and the same species after all.