Missing Links
The concept of a missing link as an elusive proof in the fossil record of a species bridging our species with other primates was not sufficiently satisfied by Lucy, the famous "upright ape" found in Kenya in 1974. Lucy is generally aged 3.2 million years old and is more likely a cousin than a direct ancestor species.
In 2006 a fossil was purchased in Germany for one million dollar and has been studied since that time by scientists who conclude it is an ancient primate. Called Ida, it is presumed to be 47 million years old and dubbed a potential ancestor to the entire primate family, including humans. The History Channel ran a program called The Link with slick production, which is easy to watch. It's light on the science and heavy on the narrative, but the curious must look online for the original publication on the find.
Finding an old set of bones (as Lucy proved before) is not enough to prove a relationship to humans. Finding a chimpanzee and the Elephant Man's bones buried in Michael Jackson's burial plot does not mean they are related. Since evolution has many parallel branches that overlap during the same time frames, and some branches abruptly terminate without descendant species, drawing the line from human to Ida is probably impossible to prove but fun to theorize.
It's likely the fame Ida received was due to the quality of the specimen and a motivation to popularize human evolution in the public domain. A marketable commodity was marketed, very well, by the same man that drove the Predator X special on the History Channel. An article posted this week confirms the primary scientist driving the Ida project is not convinced the fossil is from a species that is an ancestor to the human species rather than another primate cousin:
In 2006 a fossil was purchased in Germany for one million dollar and has been studied since that time by scientists who conclude it is an ancient primate. Called Ida, it is presumed to be 47 million years old and dubbed a potential ancestor to the entire primate family, including humans. The History Channel ran a program called The Link with slick production, which is easy to watch. It's light on the science and heavy on the narrative, but the curious must look online for the original publication on the find.
Finding an old set of bones (as Lucy proved before) is not enough to prove a relationship to humans. Finding a chimpanzee and the Elephant Man's bones buried in Michael Jackson's burial plot does not mean they are related. Since evolution has many parallel branches that overlap during the same time frames, and some branches abruptly terminate without descendant species, drawing the line from human to Ida is probably impossible to prove but fun to theorize.
It's likely the fame Ida received was due to the quality of the specimen and a motivation to popularize human evolution in the public domain. A marketable commodity was marketed, very well, by the same man that drove the Predator X special on the History Channel. An article posted this week confirms the primary scientist driving the Ida project is not convinced the fossil is from a species that is an ancestor to the human species rather than another primate cousin:
The money spent on Ida – the starting price was $1 million – was that spent purely on the fact that it was an exceptionally preserved primate, or did it have something to do with its potential evolutionary relationship to humans?
No. We started off thinking it was the ancestor of all lemurs.
It may still turn out to be a lemur. Do you still have an open mind about that?
Of course, this is science. The discussions will go for a long time. And if other people's arguments are better than what we present here or what we are going to do in the next two papers, we will accept it, no problem.
respond or e-mail this post:
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home