For Sir David Attenborough there was no doubt. “The link until now was
missing. Well, it is no longer missing,” he announced last week.
It was a powerful statement. The missing link Attenborough was talking about
was Ida, the beautifully preserved fossilised remains of an early primate
that roamed part of Germany 47m years ago.
Ida, he suggested, was the clinching evidence showing how humans and other
primates evolved from the simple mammals that roamed the Earth alongside the
dinosaurs more than 65m years ago.
The claims were marred only by Attenborough’s choice of an evocative phrase
with a rather dodgy history. Last century the term “missing link” became
tainted by its association with the “discovery” in 1912 of Piltdown Man.
This fossil of an apparent early human fooled scientists for 40 years before
tests revealed it as a hoax.
Ida appears not to be a hoax - but could she be hype?
Attenborough acted in good faith but he was just one element of the media
circus turning Ida into humanity’s newest and best link with its ancient
past.
Such finds are usually unveiled to the world through the sober pages of an
academic journal but for Ida nothing less than a glittering press conference
at the American Museum of Natural History in New York would do.
There, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, stood beside Ida’s glass box,
his arm around a schoolgirl who was wearing a T-shirt advertising a
television tie-in. It read: “The Link. This changes everything.” The mayor
repeated the missing link claim.
Later the scientists who have studied Ida outlined the details of their
research. Their pronouncements were just as extravagant.
“This fossil rewrites our understanding of the evolution of primates,” said
Jorn Hurum, a paleontologist from the Natural History Museum in Oslo,
Norway. “It will probably be pictured in all the textbooks for the next 100
years.” He made allusions to the Mona Lisa to emphasise the significance of
the find.
His co-authors supported him. “When our results are published, it will be just
like an asteroid hitting the earth,” said Jens Franzen of the Senckenberg
Research Institute of Frankfurt. “She is the eighth wonder of the world.”
The excitement spread fast. One newspaper said Ida could “revolutionise how we
see human evolution”. Even geeky Google was impressed, adding an impression
of the fossil to the front page of its website.
Many scientists, however, were shocked. They revere understatement, knowing
how easily allegations of hype can damage careers.
What is more, in the research paper detailing the discovery, the scientists
had painted a rather different picture. Ida, they said, “could represent a
stem group from which later anthropoid primates (including humans) evolved
but we are not advocating this here”.
So, if they were not advocating a link to humans in their research, why did
they appear to be doing so in their public statements? Was it anything to do
with the television documentary, narrated by Attenborough, that Hurum was
launching on the back of his discovery? Or a book about Ida, called The
Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor, which was published last week? Was
science taking second place to PR hype?
IDA’S story began 47m years ago in a period of the Earth’s history known as
the eocene. The dinosaurs had been gone for 18m years and the planet was in
the middle of a long period of global warming.
Back then, Messel, near Frankfurt, where Ida lived and died, was part of a
giant tropical rainforest. It would have been hot, humid and teeming with
life.
What made Messel special, however, was its lakes, formed in the giant basins
left by the explosion of a volcano. These lakes were full of poisonous gases
from the volcano. Every so often, it is thought the gases would bubble out
and kill any animal that breathed them.
Many of these fell into the water and sank to the bottom, where they were
enveloped by the sediments and preserved for humans to find eons later.
Ida was one of thousands of animals to have died and been preserved there.
Other discoveries nearby include pygmy horses, giant mice, primitive
ostriches and crocodiles.
It was in 1983 that an anonymous collector unearthed Ida. He would have known
straight-away that he had found something remarkable, simply because Ida was
so complete.
Most fossils are just bits of animals - usually teeth since these are the
toughest. Ida, by contrast, was so well preserved that 95% of her skeleton
could be seen, along with the contents of her stomach and the outline of her
fur.
The collector took meticulous care to preserve Ida’s remains, but then she
disappeared. For the past 20 years she has sat in his private collection,
enjoyed, it is thought, by just one person.
Two years ago, however, the collector commissioned Thomas Perner, a fossil
dealer, to put Ida on the market. He approached Hurum and they fixed up a
meeting in a Hamburg vodka bar.
“I knew the dealer had a world sensation in his hands,” said Hurum, who agreed
to pay Perner £630,000 to buy her for the University of Oslo.
Ever since then a team of scientists have painstakingly deconstructed Ida,
measuring every tooth, bone and nail. They have confirmed that Ida is indeed
a real find. Her opposable thumbs, nails on her digits and lack of a
grooming claw showed the researchers she was a primate rather than just one
of the many other tree-dwelling creatures of the era. In recognition of her
importance, she was given the name Darwinius masillae, in honour of the
200th anniversary of the naturalist’s birth.
For the rest of us, however, her significance is rather more puzzling.
Christophe Soligo, a specialist in early primate evolution at University
College London, is an admirer of Ida – but concerned over what he fears
may be hype.
“This is an absolutely amazing fossil,” he said. “But to suggest she might be
the missing link in human evolution is simply too much. There is a great
risk of discovery bias, where we read too much into a good fossil just
because we have it available.”
Robert Foley, professor of human evolution at Cambridge University, believes
many people misunderstand the huge timescales involved in assessing fossils.
“This animal lived around 47m years ago but human-like creatures only appeared
in the last 2m years,” he said. “That’s a gap of around 45m years with many
other species lying between us and that era. Any one of them could be called
a missing link. Really, the term is meaningless.”
Foley and others calculate that mammal species last an average of 1m-2m years
before going extinct. This suggests that Ida is, at best, just one of dozens
of direct forebears.
It is far more likely, however, that she is even more distant than this.
That’s because every one of those forebears, including those before Ida,
could have given rise to several separate new species and hence new lines of
descent.
Simple calculations suggest there must have been several thousand such
species. The likelihood, based on the numbers alone, is that Ida was just
one of those.
The science and the hype have had one unexpected benefit, however - they have
unified in outrage two famous rival paleontologists: Elwyn Simons of Duke
University, who maintains that primates emerged out of Africa, and
Christopher Beard, curator of the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, who
counter-argues for an Asian Eden.
“Dr Simons phoned me for the first time in 10 years to share his outrage about
this malarkey and, for the first time in a decade, I agree with him,” said
Beard last week.
“First, the paper is shoddy scholarship because it avoids comparing Darwinius
masillae with similar fossils to put it into a proper context. The roll-out
was extraordinary and it is now clear that the scientists were under
pressure to meet the showbusiness deadlines. The tail was wagging the dog–
or maybe the lemur.”
Simons does not buy the spin either. “It’s absurd and dangerous,” he said.
“This is all bad science and it plays into the hands of the
creationists, who look for any excuse to discredit evolution.
“Darwinius is a wonderful fossil, but it is not a missing link of any kind. It
representsa dead end in evolution. It tells us nothing that we do not
already know, except that people will be overwhelmed by hype.”
THE answer to why Ida received so much publicity, despite these reservations,
may lie with Hurum’s own flourishing media career.
One of his biggest hits was in February 2008, when he announced the discovery
of the “largest and fiercest reptile ever to terrorise the oceans”.
“The Monster”, as he dubbed it, was a 50ft pliosaur that Hurum described as
having teeth and jaws that “could crush almost anything”.
Last March he was back with another fantastic fossil, also a pliosaur and
roughly the same size. It could have sounded all too similar but Hurum’s
masterstroke was to devise a new name. Predator X, he told the world, was
“turbo-charged” and “the most ferocious hunter ever”.
A television documentary soon followed and it was during the making of it that
he told Atlantic Productions, the film-maker, about Ida, his new project.
The company snapped it up and has since sold The Link, a documentary, to the
BBC and the History Channel, which will screen it this week. It will include
computer-generated graphics showing the reconstructed animal standing on its
hind legs – in an uncannily human pose.
“We were just lucky to be working with him at the time he found Ida,” said a
spokesman for Atlantic.
Hurum himself defended the showmanship surrounding Ida. “Any pop band is doing
the same thing,” he said. “Any athlete is doing the same thing. We have to
start thinking the same way in science.”
To be fair to him, he did qualify the claims being made for Ida. “We are not
stating that this is our direct ancestor. That’s too much,” he said. “We
[humans] go just a few million years back and Ida was alive 47m years ago.”
Somehow, however, that line got lost amid the talk of everything changing and
wonders of the world.
