DOI: 10.5061/dryad.2jm63xss1
title: Southwest China, the last refuge of continental primates in East Asia

description: Knowledge of primate evolutionary history from the Late Miocene to the
 present in East Asia is necessary to develop a tangible conservation
 strategy for their today and future. This background is especially evident
 from the distributions of fossil-bearing sites in the Pleistocene and
 historical records over the past 800 years. They illustrate catarrhines’
 early dispersal and radiation routes, paths, and later shrinking
 trajectories, based on which their future distribution areas can be
 predicted, providing robust evidence and information for making or
 amending conservation strategies. The catarrhines (apes and Old-World
 monkeys) in East Asia are analyzed. Their spread during the Pleistocene
 from the west to east remarkably involved the three river systems
 (Yangtze, Yellow, and Pearl) and the coastlines, resulting in broad
 distributions in the Far East (Taiwan, Korea, and Japan). Their
 continental taxa significantly suffered reductions from ancient to modern
 Holocene, leading to a tremendous biodiversity loss in East Asia. These
 events corresponded to major periodic social upheavals and anthropogenic
 activities, particularly the Second World War and Civil War in the first
 half of the last century and the post-war period after 1950 that has
 involved unparalleled environmental devastation and natural resource
 depletion. Except for the taxa in Taiwan and Japan, primates, including
 the catarrhines and strepsirrhines, in East Asia will finally be confined
 to Southwest China, especially a Convergence-Divergence Center (CDC) that
 has played a unique role in shielding primates and other animals, as well
 as the plants since the Later Miocene. Thus, developing a specific
 conservation priority is critical for the CDC and its adjacent regions to
 mitigate primate extinction in East Asia.
description: This study is based on two
 databases collected from a broad literature review:
 1) Primate fossil locations (please see Appendix)
 discovered in the Late Miocene (11.6 – 5.3 mya), Pliocene (5.3 – 2.58
 mya), Early Pleistocene (2.58 – 0.77 may), Middle Pleistocene (0.77– 0.129
 mya) and Late Pleistocene (0.129 – 0.0117 mya). However, as the fossil
 sites of the catarrhines in the Pliocene are very scarce, especially
 regarding the Pongidae and Hylobatidae (Harrison 2016), the reconstruction of the dispersal scenarios
 focused on the Pleistocene.   2) Pongidae was extinct in the Late Pleistocene, so
 later information in the
 Holocene comes from historical geographic distributions of the existing
 Colobinae (from 1304), Cercopithecinae (from 1175), and Hylobatidae (from
 1182): a remarkable 800-year period. Such information is from the records
 of Chinese local governmental historical archives, annals, journals, and
 books; more details have been given in our previous publications: (Li et
 al., 2020; Li et al., 2002). Public records categorize catarrhines into
 four different groups: 1) gibbons, called “Yuan” in Chinese, are
 characterized by long upper limbs, slim body structure, unique calls, and
 acrobatic behavior (Zhang, 2015; Zhou and Zhang, 2013). Their records
 appeared since the Zhou Dynasty (1027-221 BC) in art, mainly in paintings
 (Geissmann, 2008), and other social services, such as funeral services,
 being buried with the dead (Vogel, 2018); 2) snub-nosed monkeys
 (<em>Rhinopithecus</em>) with up-turned nostrils and sturdy
 body structure; 3) leaf-eating monkeys (<em>Presbytis</em>,
 <em>Trachypithecus</em>, <em>Pygathrix</em>, and <em>Semnopithecus</em>), showing slender body structure with typical arboreal lifestyle and special folivorous diets; and 4) macaques that are primarily terrestrial and morphologically quite different from the other groups (Li et al., 2020). Among the four, 1) belongs to the Hylobatidae (gibbons), containing Nomascus (4 species), <em>Hylobates</em> (1 species), and <em>Hoolock</em> (1 species); 2) and 3) are classified as the Colobinae (colobines), including snub-nosed monkeys (<em>Rhinopithecus</em>, five species) and langurs (<em>Trachypithecus</em>, six species; <em>Pygathrix</em>, one species; and <em>Semnopithecus</em>, one species); and 4) is regarded as the Cercopithecinae (<em>Macaca</em>), consisting eight species (Li et al., 2018).