Last time, I introduced a bit of light summer reading, a mere word list from the internet. This time, I’m into something a bit heavier, namely a couple of dueling fossils. Back in May, a European scientist managed to get his hands on an interesting fossil, which he nicknamed after his daughter, Ida. The fossil was an early primate from the Eocene period, found in a pit in Germany called Messel, and the dead beastie found fame and a certain amount of fortune for her discoverers as “The Link.” She got her own TV show on the History Channel, has her own website, got lots of press for awhile, and is supposed to be a missing link in our own ancestry. I have her book, too, complete with lots of neat pictures.
Little Miss Ida (the fossil primate, not the daughter of Mr. Hurum, who bought the fossil) is definitely remarkable, the most complete primate fossil ever found. She’s 47 million years old and, although a little squashed, has a skull, a neck and backbone, ribs, a shoulder, most of two arms and hands, one leg and a foot, and a long tail. Part of her had shown up previously on another bit of shale, sold to a museum in the U.S., along with some faked bits (including some hands that didn’t really belong and a fake tail). This was all described in incredible detail in a PLoS paper (and I’ll give web references, etc., down below). The good fossil even shows the outline of her soft parts, fur as well as the contents of her tummy when she kicked the bucket, something that occurs in fossilization so rarely that it’s even less likely than being hit by lightning three times running.
During that long-ago Eocene era, Messel (the pit where she was found) was in the middle of a nice, tropical jungle, and Ida along with it. She was probably very happy, scampering about in the trees. That is, she was until she fell in that big pond where got squashed and fossilized. Back then, Europe wasn’t attached to either Africa or most of Asia, Scandinavia being mostly part of the latter continent, or so it appears from the map in her book. There were no people back then, no apes, and no monkeys either (although they may have been “on the way” in Africa or Asia – a long way off from Messel – unless, of course, it turns out they evolved in Europe, but we won’t get into THAT). But there were some primates – the group of living things into which all these different critters are grouped by biologists, along with tarsiers, lemurs, and lorises (not to mention pottos).
When she was announced on the internet, or at least when I first read about her, little Miss flat-as-a-pancake Ida was reported as the Great-great-great-great (etc.) Granny of all these different modern groups of primates. That's why she was The Link, you see. As in that out-dated expression, “missing link.” She was the dot that was missing from all the dot-to-dot theories proposed up to then, the super-dot who was going to make them all come to fruition and turn into a real picture and make sense! Oh boy!
However, nothing is ever quite that neat in the paleo business, whether it’s paleoanthropology (the study of ancient people) or paleobiology (the study of ancient beasties). So, naturally, there is a certain amount of controversy over this find and her interpretation. Somebody else found another, somewhat less complete fossil of a slightly less ancient primate, way across the continent in China. He didn’t give it half as sweet a nickname when he found it, though, a few years ago. As a result, you may not have heard about this other primate, known to scholars basically as Eosimias, which means Dawn Monkey in Latin and Greek, but it, too, was billed as our ancestor. It lived about 45 million years ago. Unfortunately, a real ancestor couldn’t have trekked all the way from China to Germany in only two million years. As a result, somebody’s fossil is only a Great-great-great (etc.) Auntie and not a direct ancestor.
Of course, both Ida and the Dawn Monkey could easily be “sister” species to us, with neither one our direct and immediate ancestor. Without DNA we can’t tell precisely. But the fur (not to mention mud) is flying in scholarly circles. "Which fossil has a bony surrounding to the eye socket? Which fossil has a solid lower jawbone? These are features that tarsiers, monkeys, apes, and people all share, but lemurs and lorises don’t have! If your fossil doesn’t have these and my fossil does, well then, your fossil isn’t as good as my fossil and must go sit in the corner and wear a dunce cap, no matter what she looks like! She’s not one of us!"
"How dare you! If my fossil has no grooming claw on her foot and your fossil doesn’t even have a foot, my darling can’t be a mere lowly lemur, so take that, you rude and awful scientist! If my fossil has tummy contents, I can prove she isn’t just eating leaves but also fruit, and so is nearly civilized, while yours has all pointy teeth and so is probably an unintelligent, leaf-eating nerd, so go off to that corner yourself!"
In the end, I’m not sure I’m any the wiser for reading all this, but I’m immensely entertained. Are we more closely related to the tarsiers, which are carnivorous because they eat birds and bugs? Oh, we must be! Who wants to have a dull-eyed loris as an uncle when they could have a quick-moving tarsier leaping about in their family tree? Never mind those monkeys of the Old World versus those of the New and that business of prehensile tails. That’s SO-O-O yesterday!
If your state is still mired in that 19th century dispute over Darwin (who died a long time ago, after all) versus Creationism (which should have died a long time ago), you’re missing an awful lot of excitement out here in the 21st century. There’s nothing quite as fun as dueling fossils, dueling paradigms, and noble scientists battling it out with PowerPoint presentations showing four different ways we can and cannot be kin to monkeys, apes, lemurs, lorises, tarsiers, pottos, and even the tree shrew (with an occasional flying squirrel thrown in for good measure).
Go check it all out and have a look at what’s presented at the “Revealing the Link” website, at the very least. While you’re there, perhaps you can come up with an explanation for why they still show that ever-popular march of primate progress (always from the left-as-primitive to the-right-as-advanced) as comprised solely of males, even though Lucy and Ida, the most famous fossils, are decidedly female. Is the implication, as one tot one proposed to me, that females were always civilized and only males evolved? Oh, surely not! Do get back to me with your theories, won’t you?
REFERENCES:
Beard, Chris, 2004, The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey: Unearthing the Origins of Monkeys, Apes, and Humans, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Franzen, Jens L., Philip D. Gingerich, Joerg Habersetzer, Joern H. Hurum, Wighart von Koenigswald, B. Holly Smith, 2009, “Complete Primate Skeleton from the Middle Eocene of Messel in Germany: Morphology and Paleobiology” in PLoS ONE (Public Library of Science) 4(4): e5723. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0005723. Published May 19, 2009.
Tudge, Colin with Josh Young, 2009, The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor, New York: Little, Brown and Company (available on Amazon.com).
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