Catarrhine primate divergence dates estimated from complete mitochondrial genomes: concordance with fossil and nuclear DNA evidence

The penalized likelihood method applied to the coding regions of the mtDNA genome yielded the following divergence date estimates, with approximate 95% confidence intervals: cercopithecine-colobine, 16.2 (14.4-17.9) Ma; colobin-presbytin, 10.9 (9.6-12.3) Ma; cercopithecin-papionin, 11.6 (10.3-12.9) Ma; and Macaca-Papio, 9.8 (8.6-10.9) Ma. Within the hominoids, the following dates were inferred: hylobatid-hominid, 16.8 (15.0-18.5) Ma; Gorilla-Homo + Pan, 8.1 (7.1-9.0) Ma; Pongo pygmaeus pygmaeus-P. p. abelii, 4.1 (3.5-4.7) Ma; and Pan troglodytes-P. paniscus, 2.4 (2.0-2.7) Ma. These dates were similar to those found using penalized likelihood on other subsets of the data, but slightly younger than several of the Bayesian estimates.