Fossil Ida: she's 47m years old – and she's our link to animal life
Watch Sir David Attenborough talking about fossil Ida The Link – courtesy Atlantic Productions
Humanity is very egocentric. We are ­fascinated with ourselves. I'm not sure that it is a particularly nice ­characteristic, but we are.
When we look around us at the natural world, there is often an ulterior motive. We desperately want to know where we came from. We love to think about us and about our ancestors.
Yesterday was humanity's first chance to come face to face with one such ancestor – and a remarkable ancient relative at that. Ida is one of the most immaculately preserved primate fossils ever found and, at 47m years old, she comes from a key moment in our evolutionary history.
This beautiful little creature is going to show us our connection with the rest of the mammals: with cows and sheep, and elephants and anteaters. According to one of the scientists who has studied her, she is a "Rosetta stone" for ­understanding our early evolution.
One reason Ida is so special is her exquisite preservation, and that is because the Messel pit, near Darmstadt in Germany, is a very exceptional place. Forty-seven million years ago it was a volcanic lake surrounded by a steamy sub-tropical forest. Because of the unique conditions there, Messel – which is now designated a Unesco world heritage site – has yielded countless fabulous fossils including bats, pygmy horses, crocodiles and even insects with the colours on their wings still visible.
People who study fossils are nearly always studying the hard parts: the shells and the bones. They have to deduce from the shape of each bone what the muscles were like. From that they can deduce more about how the animal held itself and moved. If they are lucky they can maybe make suggestions about what the internal organs were like.
With this fossil you don't have to make suggestions. Almost uniquely, we not only have the bones, but we also have the fur and the flesh. So it is not a question of deduction, it is not a question of imagination or suggestions, it is fact.
Right before our eyes is exquisite detail of what the little primate looked like. There is the stomach, and inside is her last meal – a final vegetarian snack. There are very few fossils for which you can say that. After the demise of the dinosaurs around 65m years ago, suddenly the domination of the Earth was up for grabs. What succeeded them, of course, were the mammals, creatures like ourselves with warm bodies and with hair. But which one of those was going to lead to us?
The more you look at Ida the more you can picture, as it were, the primate in embryo. She represents the seed from which the diversity of monkeys, apes and ultimately every person on the planet came.
She lived long before our primate line had split into the species we know today – the spider monkeys, baboons and gorillas to name but a few. And crucially, she lived at around the time that a separate primate line, the one containing the lemurs and less well-known groups such as the lorises and bush babies, split off from the rest. She is a glimpse into the melting pot of early primate evolution.
Is Ida the missing link? Well, yes and no. Lines of ancestry are extremely difficult to work out from a series of fossils and there are still huge gaps in our understanding of the primate evolutionary story. But the physical proof of evolution has always demanded that there should be links or transitional forms. The famous Archaeopteryx – the first specimen of which resides in the Natural History Museum in London – for example, is one such transitional fossil between the reptiles and birds. Those who doubt that very simple generalised mammals gave rise to the primates could always ask, "show us the link". Well that link is no longer missing.
Jørn Hurum, the palaeontologist who acquired the fossil for science and assembled a world-class team to study it, deserves great credit. He had the insight and the instinct to see this thing and to know in his heart immediately that this was going to be of profound importance. It was certainly an act of scholarship and of scientific insight.
But to a certain degree, it was also an act of faith. He might have spent years, and quite a lot of money, on something that was going to prove to be a dead end. His gamble has paid off spectacularly.
To anybody who's interested in ­evolution, and the ultimate demonstration of the truth of evolution – the fact of evolution – this is a key discovery. And it is fitting that Hurum's team have chosen, in Darwin's 200th birthday year, to name the fossil after the father of natural selection. Ida's scientific name is Darwinius masillae.
Darwin was very sensitive about the implications of his explanation of evolution, and in particular how human beings fitted into the picture. It was a nettle that had to be grasped, but it would offend quite a lot of people he knew, his wife a devoted Christian, for one. Darwin could almost get away with explanations of evolution in other parts of the animal world. But the notion that we were connected to other animals, was one that was deeply upsetting to a lot of religious people.
It is really delightful that 150 years after Darwin first tentatively put forward the proposition that human beings were part of the rest of animal life, here at last we have the link which connects us. Ida is a link between the apes, monkeys and us with the rest of the mammals and ultimately the whole animal kingdom. I think Darwin would have been thrilled.
Based on an interview by Anthony Geffen for Atlantic Productions