Southwest China, the last refuge of continental primates in East Asia

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 tremen...