OAKLAND - Some thumbs in the scientific community are up and some are down when it comes to the newly published "The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey" by Chris Beard of Adams Township.

Not a text for serious paleontology students, the book is written for average readers with an interest in evolution, geologic change and climate shifts over millennia.

While Beard, the curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, doesn't exactly thumb his nose at accepted evolution theories, he questions whether the cradle of our ancestors was always Africa.

And he does it by searching the fossil record in other places, such as Asia. That's where he and other members of an American/Chinese team of scientists found a jaw and some other bones of what he named Eosimias sinensis, or the Dawn Monkey of China, a thumb-sized creature with an opposable thumb.

"The fossil record that separates apes and humans is well documented. Scientifically, it's ho-hum," said Beard. "Once scientists all agree, it's not scientifically interesting anymore, and they move on to other topics."

But when it comes to bridging the gap between primitive primates and higher primates, "It's still up for debate and is of intensive scientific debate," said Beard - with about 100 scientists worldwide weighing in on the subject."It's the things that people fight about that (are) interesting," he added."We don't really have an answer yet as to where and when it happened," Beard said of how one branch of mammals evolved into lemurs and stopped and another became Eosimias sinensis and marched forward through time and change.According to Beard, lemurs have been, evolutionarily speaking, "frozen in time" for the past 50 million years. On the other hand, the mammal Eosimias sinensis evolved into "proto-monkeys," which in turn became monkeys, apes and finally, homo sapiens.Fossils of tarsiers, a vanishing species of primate discussed in Beard's book, have been found on several continents, including North America and Asia. Their last stronghold is in Borneo, having become extinct everywhere else.Political changes and globalization have opened fieldwork areas in Asia and Africa that had been difficult to work in before, said Beard. He has recently worked on digs from North China to the Vietnam border and into Myanmar, formerly Burma.China's newly conceived Open Door policy in the early 1980s allowed Qi Tao from Beijing to come to the Carnegie, which in turn led to a reciprocal visit for Beard to do joint fieldwork with Qi near Shanghuang, near the eastern coast of China, not far from Shanghai."There were lots and lots of fossils of early monkeys. Atfirst, we didn't know what kind of primates they were. We had incredible success."After finding fossilized remnants of what became known as Eosimias sinensis and studying them for more than 10 years, Beard spent two years preparing his research and writing the book, scheduled for publication in December.Although Beard's research points to Asia as the embarkation point for higher primates, he does agree the rise of man is an African event. How the nascent higher primates covered the distance between the two landmasses is a bit of a mystery, he said.About the time of the journey, Asia and Africa were not connected by the Middle East. A sea stretched from the Indian Ocean through what is now the Persian Gulf and extended through to the Mediterranean."It would have made it harder" for primate migration, Beard said, "but they did get there, and the fact that they did had to be incredibly important."

What the migrating higher primates found in Africa was a tropical paradise with abundant food resulting in a "burst of evolution," he explained. "It was the key event in our evolutionary history. If the lemurs had gotten there first, we would have probably never evolved."Aside from evolution, extinction of species, especially primates, is a collateral issue addressed in his book."I'm not the first person to tackle this," said Beard. In 1800, Georges Cuvier, the most famous French scientist of his day and a contemporary of Thomas Jefferson, found fossils around Paris that he couldn't identify with any living animal. Until that time, extinction of a species was a biblically based "logical impossibility," because what God made, lasted.The theory of extinction, supported by Cuvier and denied by Jefferson, was one of the reasons for the Lewis and Clark expedition, according to Beard.Jefferson held that mastodons and mammoths were alive in the west and were the same as elephants. Cuvier maintained they were different animals altogether and although fossils of the ancient behemoths could be found, they were extinct. Cuvier won the bet.It wasn't until 1859 that Charles Darwin addressed the subject of evolution.Darwin, like Beard, published for a greater readership than just the scientific circle. "It can be very influential to speak to both audiences at once," said Matt Cartmill, Ph.D., of Duke University's Department of Biological Anthropology and Anatomy. Cartmill, like Beard, is an expert in our distant antecedents."(Beard's) opinions are certainly respected, tenable and backed up by fossils," said Cartmill. "This is an increasingly influential school of thought," and whether or not Beard's theory is completely correct, it is "not intrinsically wrong." Said Cartmill, "Some think (his theories) are obviously false; some think he's probably right. I don't know how the numbers work out.""Evolution is the only unifying concept biology has," said Beard - and bringing scientific truth to the public is one of his main goals."This version of the truth I'll put up against Genesis any day of the week. As 'cutting edge science,' it will most likely be revised over time," he added. "The U.S. economy is dependent on science and research. We need to train our children the best we can in biology and science to make them economically competitive in the global economy."