Early human 'missing link' ancestor unveiled

[UnSub]

It's 95% complete as a skeleton, about 50 cm in length. Complete with structural features reminiscent of humans.

Not sure if this post belongs in Serious Business or Politics. Guess the comments from here on in will decide that.

[voodoolily]

We should have a "Science: It works, bitches!" subforum.

[Samwise]

proof of this transitional species finally confirms Charles Darwin's theory of evolution

 

By which I mean to say, I somehow doubt this is going to be the final piece of evidence needed to convince any fence-sitters.

[Miguel]

47 million years old?  But that's impossible!  It can't be much more than 2000 years old...

<ducks and runs>

That's really cool.  I hope some more good discoveries come out of it.

[Yegolev]

They say its impact on the world of palaeontology will be "somewhat like an asteroid falling down to Earth".

I wish they would stop trying to downplay this discovery.  It might literally hit Paleontology so hard that it vaporizes, leaving a smoking crater in the side of Science.

[Jherad]

I'm surprised this isn't getting more coverage - arguably one of the most important scientific discoveries of the last century, and it is getting fewer column inches than a car crash.

[Yegolev]

I'm not surprised.  Average people don't give a shit about this.  I'm not sure they understand it's like a meteor.

[Mosesandstick]

The article says the fossil's going to be on display at the Natural History Museum in London later this month. Awesome!

[Hawkbit]

This news pales in comparison to all things American Idol.

[Rasix]

I'm surprised this isn't getting more coverage - arguably one of the most important scientific discoveries of the last century, and it is getting fewer column inches than a car crash.

There is no dead or missing white girl. Non news.

[Oban]

Ok, knew it was out there:

http://www.ultimatedisney.com/dinosaur.html

[Miguel]

I'm not surprised.  Average people don't give a shit about this.  I'm not sure they understand it's like a meteor.

They might care if Bruce Willis was sent to blow it up.

[K9]

It's a cool fossil.

[CmdrSlack]

It's a cool fossil.

It really pulls the origin of species together.

[Samwise]

Although I'm sure it's a very impressive monkey, the website does a piss-poor job of explaining its significance to a layman like myself.  I see the similarities, but aren't there already primates around that we're even more similar to, like chimps?

[gryeyes]

Ya, im not really sure where that fossil fits in. Ive seen several varying genealogies for primates, how exactly do they place that fossil in the time line? Is it limited to just physiology?  That is supposed to be the oldest shared ancestor between humans and other primates?

[Trippy]

From looking at the main media site (http://www.revealingthelink.com/) it looks like Ida is either the/a common ancestor to the anthropoids (monkeys, apes, humans) and prosimians (lemurs, lorises, tarsiers) or the earliest known anthropoid (the info the site is contradictory).

[gryeyes]

That is an extremely misleading and bombastic article.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8058154.stm


Or if you want more detail.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0005723#pone-0005723-g001

Darwinius masillae is now the third primate species from the Messel locality that belongs to the cercamoniine adapiforms, in addition to Europolemur koenigswaldi and E. kelleri. Darwinius masillae is unrelated to Godinotia neglecta from Geiseltal, which was much more slenderly built. Darwinius and Godinotia neglecta are similar, however, in the degree of reduction of their antemolar dentition. Morphological characteristics preserved in Darwinius masillae enable a rigorous comparison with the two principal subdivisions of living primates: Strepsirrhini and Haplorhini. Defining characters of Darwinius ally it with early haplorhines rather than strepsirrhines. We do not interpret Darwinius as anthropoid, but the adapoid primates it represents deserve more careful comparison with higher primates than they have received in the past.

Darwinius masillae is important in being exceptionally well preserved and providing a much more complete understanding of the paleobiology of an Eocene primate than was available in the past.

[Samwise]

So it's not a missing link between humans and monkeys.  It's a missing link between monkeys and other monkeys.  That is less exciting.

[Trippy]

So it's not a missing link between humans and monkeys.

We already know that link (or at least something in that proximity):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegyptopithecus

[Fraeg]

"Well you see, a day for God is different than a day for us mortals.... heh, I bet you don't know how long a minute for god actually is."


-more or less how a conversation went with (I shit you not) a creationist geologist I once worked with

[Slyfeind]

So it's not a missing link between humans and monkeys.  It's a missing link between monkeys and other monkeys.  That is less exciting.

There is no missing link between humans and monkeys, because we didn't evolve from monkeys; we all evolved from a common ancestor...which I think you knew already. Or am I misunderstanding?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegyptopithecus

Crap, people need to stop saying "link." It makes me think sequentially.

[Oban]

creationist geologist

So what were his thoughts on petroleum?

[Hawkbit]

So it's not a missing link between humans and monkeys.  It's a missing link between monkeys and other monkeys.  That is less exciting.

There is no missing link between humans and monkeys, because we didn't evolve from monkeys; we all evolved from a common ancestor...which I think you knew already. Or am I misunderstanding?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegyptopithecus

Crap, people need to stop saying "link." It makes me think sequentially.

You're spot-on.  We've all got the Darwin ape to man image stuck in our heads.  It really needs to be thrown out, because it's entirely misleading.  There are hundreds of species that simply died out and didn't evolve further because of various reasons (poor evolution, competition, overspecialization... etc.).  The likelihood of us finding the exact lineage of our evolutionary ancestry is near impossible.

[gryeyes]

There are many transitional fossils related to humans. The entire concept of a single link is inaccurate. Original article is bombastic bullshit. The history of that fossil is far more interesting than the original story, the history is in the second link.


Edit: What Hawkbit said, i did not fully read the thread before responding.

@ K9, why did you hold back?

[K9]

There is no missing link between humans and monkeys, because we didn't evolve from monkeys; we all evolved from a common ancestor...which I think you knew already. Or am I misunderstanding?

As hawkbit says, you're spot on, the notion that we evolved from monkeys is a deliberate misinterpretation spread by opponents of the theory of evolution. Early homonids emerged from a common ancestor with the chimpanzees and the gorillas around 6 million years ago (although estimates of the most recent common ancestor do have quite a large margin of error); however the notion that there was a single binary split and presto! we had humans and chimps is a gross oversimplification. During the species divergence there would have been an extended fuzzy period when there would have been a range of organisms intermediate between the extremes of the diverging lineages (chimp, human and gorilla since there is some good evidence for overlap in the periods of divergance of the three ultimate species). There would also have been other sub-lineages which didn't survive and were either absorbed into one of the main lineages or died out completely. The actual pre-homonid diverged from the pre-orangutang prior to this, and the pre-species for that organism diverged from the pre-gibbon lineage prior to this. During all these periods of speciation and divergence there would have been other lineages that didn't make it.

So essentially the true fossil record is a lot messier than the nice-clean family trees you see knocking around. Any fossils of early primates or early mammals are interesting, but to specifically label one as "the missing link" is realistically impossible. In fact as you observe, the whole notion of a missing link is misleading, since it implies a discrete chain of evolution, which is likely not the case.

[Cyrrex]

Some of what you just said is complete news to me - which is at least partly because I'm just not that interested in the topic.  But you've illustrated an important point.  I guarantee you that the vast majority of people do not know this, and as a result...when they see a discovery like this come out and being described as "missing link found!", it looks pretty ridiculous.  Nobody seems to be capable of explaining this very well, which only gives fuel to the creationists.  When the science doesn't even appear to make sense, what good is it?

So all that said, and in all seriousness, just WHY is this fossil such an interesting find?  If there are no ture links, as you say, then it's just yet another in a large collection of fossils in the collage?

[IainC]

So all that said, and in all seriousness, just WHY is this fossil such an interesting find?  If there are no ture links, as you say, then it's just yet another in a large collection of fossils in the collage?

from what I understand it's important for several reasons.

• It's a very complete fossil that even preserves the soft tissues which is unusual and gives a lot of additional information to the research teams.
• It's quite rare, early primates are not found often and even less often in such a complete state
• It's an interstitial fossil showing a clear line forwards and backwards down the evolutionary timeline. There aren't true 'missing links' as Hawkbit correctly points out but there are datapoints that intersect the line very neatly, this is one of those.
• Creatures like this are predicted by the theory of macro evolution, when fossils are found that match these predictions it makes the theory significantly stronger.

[Trippy]

Translate "missing link" as "possible common ancestor" and then look at this diagram which I hacked up from something I found on the Interweb:



We've found primate fossils along some of the other "prebranch" points going to the right (Aegyptopithecus, mentioned above, being one of them). Those species may or may not be our exact ancestor species but they are considered "representative" examples. Ida, I'm assuming, is the first primate we've found that's very close to the prosimian/anthropoid ("Simians" in the above diagram) branch point, hence the claim of being a "missing link".

[Jherad]

That's an awesome diagram, makes it much easier to visualise, thanks.

[gryeyes]

I don't know the validity of this critique but it seems to mesh well with both of the other links. Even their own research paper (not sure if my link is a peer reviewed journal or not) strongly implies it.

http://scienceblogs.com/laelaps/2009/05/poor_poor_ida_or_overselling_a.php

As outlined in the paper "Evolving Perspectives on Anthropoidea" (among others) included in the recent Anthropoid Origins volume, it presently appears that tarsiers and omomyids are the closest groups to anthropoids. This is based upon a combination of fossil, genetic, and morphological evidence. This makes the adapid primates, including Darwinius, a more distant side branch more closely related to living lemurs and lorises.

[Trippy]

Interesting critique.

[bhodi]

http://www.revealingthelink.com/

[Falconeer]

It's a beautiful fossil, and it really smells of H.R. Giger. Nuff said.

[K9]

Nobody seems to be capable of explaining this very well, which only gives fuel to the creationists.  When the science doesn't even appear to make sense, what good is it?

Macro-evolution is hard to describe for several reasons. Firstly the scales are huge, and the changes are tiny. Secondly, you need to be able to visualise species not as discrete points, but as fuzzy entities. Thirdly you need to accept that speciation and evolution are continuous, rather than discrete processes. The second and third points are hard to describe, particularly visually, as you get incredibly messy images. Phylogenetic trees (like the one Trippy posted) are a potent for describing broad lineages, but they do make the implication that species divergance is a sudden event, rather than a gradual (although in reality the rate at which species have diverged in the past is highly variable). They also only make an inference about a single evolutionary path. This is a fairly robust approximation under the assumptions of the coalescent theory however it does not permit or make any assumptions about the reverse of the process. As such, any lineages which became extinct are challenging to place on trees when genetic sequence data is available, and impossible without. Consider that the half-life of DNA is ~4.5 million years and you can see that the majority of extinct lineages cannot be accurately placed relative to one-another. Hence while we can place Ida as a point on the inferred tree, we cannot explicitly say that descendants of Ida went on to form modern primates, or whether primates and Ida shared a common ancestor. On the flip side, Ida does establish that there were primitive primate-like mammals around at a time when the pre-species of the primate lineages were also existing on the earth. The quality of the fossil (it has fur, and remnants of ingested food) make it a remarkable snapshot into the world 46 million years ago. Ida is an important piece of the puzzle, and one which adds ever more weight to the theory of evolution. However due to the decay of DNA, and the incomplete nature of the fossil record (little more than a tiny percentage of all morphologically distinct species will ever be represented in the record) we will never have a complete picture.

As to your second point; while science should strive to be understandable by the lay individual, it is inherently complex, and so some things are going to naturally take longer to be univerally accepted. Just because it isn't immediately clear to an individual (no offense to you) does not mean it doesn't have worth. Admittedly, evolutionary science is more of an ivory-tower exercise than other branches of science, but it does make sense given a certain level of understanding and its worth would seem inherent, given humanity's incessant desire to understand our origins.