African Fossil Changes Ideas of Ant Origins

The first fossil ant from Africa, found in amber dating back 95 million years, challenges a previously held theory that ants originated in North America or East Asia.

The finding is part of a larger study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences identifying 28 fossilized insects, one spider and one mite, as well as a variety of flora all trapped in amber from Ethiopia.


The insects, the oldest that have been identified in Africa, are from the Cretaceous. There are also numerous fungi, ferns and spores that were previously unknown to paleontologists.

Until now, paleontologists had assumed that ants originated in North America or South Asia, because the only known fossils were from these regions, said Alexander Schmidt, the paper’s lead author and a biologist at the University of Göttingen in Germany.

He and his colleagues are convinced that further analysis will reveal more about the evolution of the ants and how the Ethiopian ant is biologically related to Cretaceous ants of the Northern Hemisphere.

The paper is a culmination of five years of study by 20 researchers from seven countries, including specialists in dating the amber, and experts in different insects and flora.

“This was a really interdisciplinary project and it was our intent to produce a holistic study,” he said.

The samples are primarily housed in Berlin and Vienna, though some are also in the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

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