It is unlikely that any Afro-Arabian primate has engendered more controversy over the last half-century’s study of anthropoid origins than has the late Eocene species Oligopithecus savagei. In his original description of Oligopithecus, (1962) argued that this genus was best interpreted as a primitive catarrhine; like many other scholars, he was intrigued by the fact that O. savagei had been recovered from a stratigraphic horizon just below those that preserved the earliest undoubted catarrhines, and that it shared with those taxa a similar morphology of the mandibular corpus and canine as well as some hallmark catarrhine apomorphies (i.e., the loss of the second premolar and the development of a honing facet for the upper canine on the mesial face of an enlarged p3). A number of subsequent studies followed Simons in accepting Oligopithecus as a probable stem catarrhine (e.g., Delson, 1975, 1977; Delson and Andrews, 1975; Hoffstetter, 1977; Kay, 1977; Szalay and Delson, 1979), but there has long been skepticism surrounding the supposition that p2 loss in Oligopithecus and Oligocene—Recent catarrhines is homologous; some workers have argued that it is (e.g., Hoffstetter, 1977, 1980), some have argued that it probably is not (e.g., Delson, 1977; Kay, 1977; Szalay and Delson, 1979), while others have argued that Oligopithecui’ p2 loss is homologous with that of geologically younger propliopithecids and hominoids, but not with that of cercopithecoids (e.g., Simons, 1974; Simons et al., 1978). Interestingly, a minority group of researchers considered the evidence from the type specimen of O. savagei to provide insufficient justification for catarrhine, or even anthropoid, status (Gingerich, 1980; Gingerich and Sahni, 1979; Szalay and Li, 1986).