Asia may be the key where ancestors of humans and other primates like apes and monkeys originated, a new study said.

Most scientists have analyzed that Africa is where humans’ ancestors originated. But a recent discovery of anthropoid fossils found in the rock formation in southern Libya could provide new clues. The fossils are about 38 million years old.

“At least one of these anthropoids appears to be clearly related to the older Asian form described in Myanmar,” said Jean-Jacques Jaeger, a paleontologist at the University of Poitiers in France and the study’s lead author. “This indicates that there was migration from Asia.”

Scientists also are of the view that the anthropoids may have originated in Africa and migrated to Asia.

We have to do much more work and we need more information about the older layers in Africa, which we are trying to find in Libya now,” he said. A study has been published in Nature.

In Asia they may have gone extinct,” Dr. Jaeger said. “The conditions were more difficult, and if this migration didn’t occur, there would not be the rise in anthropoids in the present world.”