Q3.23. Although primates are widely distributed, biogeographers have debated the origin of South American monkeys. Two distinct hypotheses have been offered:

Vicariance hypothesis: South American and African monkeys began to diverge when the South America broke off from Africa.
Dispersal hypothesis: Sometime after it broke from Africa, South America was colonized by dispersing old-world (African) monkeys that eventually evolved to become the new-world monkeys of today.

Which of the following, if true, would allow you to reject one of the two hypotheses?

A. If fossil evidence places new-world monkeys in South America well before South America separated from Africa, you must reject the dispersal hypothesis
B. If South America separated from Africa about the same time that South American monkeys diverged from African monkeys, you must reject the dispersal hypothesis
C. If the separation of the two continents occurred well before the evolution of the common ancestor of African and South American monkeys, you must reject the vicariance hypothesis.