Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor

'The link they would have said until now is missing… it is no longer missing.’ Sir David Attenborough

Scientists have announced today in New York the discovery of a 47 million year old human ancestor. Discovered in Messel Pit, Germany, the fossil is twenty times older than most fossils that explain human evolution. Known as ‘Ida’, the fossil is a transitional species showing characteristics from the very primitive non-human evolutionary line (prosimians, such as lemurs), but she is more related to the human evolutionary line (anthropoids, such as monkeys, apes and humans). This places Ida at the very root of anthropoid evolution – when primates were first developing the features that would evolve into our own. The scientists’ findings are published today by PLoS One, the open source journal of the Public Library of Science.