People who move to property in Spain might be surprised when they hear of when primates first lived in Catalonia.

New remains have just been identified of a primate placed about 11 million years ago – one-sixth of the way back to when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.

And anyone relocating to property in Spain could find they have more in common with the primitive primate than they might imagine.

The species, named Pliopithecus canmatensis, had also moved to Catalonia from elsewhere in the world, with its own ancestors believed to have lived in Asia.

David Alba, researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona’s Catalan Institute for Palaeontology, says: "The most probable evolutionary scenario for this group is that the Pliopithecoidea were the first Catarrhini to disperse from Africa to Eurasia."

More recently, Spain has been in the hands of a variety of different modern cultures, including the Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians and Phoenicians around the third century BC.

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