There are three ways by which the last common ancestor (LCA) of apes and humans

can be reconstructed: one is to work backwards from the known fossil history of
humans (and ideally of chimpanzees except they have almost no known fossil history);
second is to work forwards from the known history of fossil apes, spanning the
Miocene; and third is to work with the end results of evolution at the present time,
comparing living apes and humans. Descriptions and interpretations of the first of
these, the hominin fossil record, have produced no clear consensus on the characters
of the LCA [Wrangham and Peterson, 1997; McGrew, 2010; Wood and Harrison,
2011; Harrison, 2012], and I will not be taking this approach.

The second method of reconstructing the LCA, through a review of fossil apes insofar
as they relate to the LCA, take up the first part of this paper [Andrews and Harrison,
2005; Andrews, 2015]. At the present time, 36 species of Miocene apes are known
during the period leading up to the origin of the human lineage [Harrison, 2010b], but
this can only be a fraction of the species that actually lived during this period from 20
to 5 million years ago (Ma). Compared with today, for example, there are 185 species
of Old World higher primates [Groves, 2001; Mittermeier et al., 2013], and it is
reasonable to suppose that in the past there may have been as many fossil species
living at any one time so that the present fossil record falls far short of the species and
morphological diversity present in the Miocene. There is no evidence that any one of
these 36 species was ancestral to any of the living apes or humans, but what they can
provide is an overview of the ranges of morphologies and environments from which
both humans and chimpanzees may have evolved. The ta