Received: 1 December 2017 | Revised: 19 January 2018 | Accepted: 19 January 2018 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.23429 CENTENNIAL PERSPECTIVE 100 years of primate paleontology Richard F. Kay Department of Evolutionary Anthropology and Division of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708 Correspondence Richard F. Kay, Duke University, Box 90383, Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Durham, NC 27708. Email:
[email protected] KEYWORDS: biogeography, euprimate origins, Haplorhini, paleobiology, Plesiadapiformes, Primates, Strepsirrhini and Malaysia is one of the most urgent scientific neces- sities (Hrdlička, 1918). From the first growth of the tree, many a limb and branch has decayed and dropped off; and these lost Members of the Association continue to recognize the need to branches of various sizes may represent those whole document human ancestry and its roots. The mission statement of the orders, families, and genera which have now no living Association states: “Physical anthropology is a biological science that representatives, and which are known to us only from deals with the adaptations, variability, and evolution of human beings having been found in a fossil state.... As buds give rise and their living and fossil relatives.” This begs the question as to how by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch closely related to humans a primate needs to be for it to fall within the out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so confines of physical anthropology. A narrow reading of the Associa- by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree tion’s mission could imply, for example, that the evolution of lemurs of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches and lorises and their extinct relatives might well be outside the Associa- the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its tion’s mission.