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  • For two years,

  • a team of top scientists have been secretly studying a unique fossil.

  • This fossil will probably be the one

  • that will be pictured in all text books for the next 100 years.

  • They believe it could be one of our earliest primate ancestors.

  • Well, it's really a kind of Rosetta Stone because it ties together

  • parts we haven't been able to associate before.

  • Have they found our oldest, complete, primate ancestor?

  • The fossil has more information in it then in any fossil I've ever seen.

  • Their research has stunned the world.

  • In the moment when the results of our investigations will be

  • published, this will be just like an asteroid hitting the earth.

  • 47 million years ago the dinosaurs were already long extinct.

  • It's the time when the blueprints for modern mammals were being established.

  • Dense, tropical rainforests cover the earth.

  • They're home to small primates.

  • Among them is an ancestor to us all.

  • For almost 200 years, scientists have searched

  • for links to our prehistoric past.

  • The search has concentrated in East Africa,

  • known as the cradle of mankind.

  • Here in the 1970s, they found the link between apes and man.

  • It offered conclusive proof that we started walking upright 3.2 million years ago.

  • A human ancestor, a female, Lucy.

  • Then in 1984, the remains of a boy were found.

  • Material evidence that 1.5 million years ago, humans had already

  • lost their hair and taken their first steps onto the open savannah.

  • Scientists have long hoped that the earth might eventually yield

  • an even more ancient fossil that links apes, man

  • and all the other primates to the earliest mammals on earth.

  • This could be it.

  • A fossil so ancient it could shine a light deeper into our history than ever before.

  • And so detailed it could help science reveal the origins of every person on the planet.

  • This fossil is so complete.

  • Everything's there. It's unheard of in the primate fossil record at all.

  • You have to get to human burial to see something that's this complete.

  • This is really, really the most complete fossil primate ever.

  • World-renowned fossil expert Dr Jorn Hurum of Oslo University

  • has spent his life scouring the earth for important fossils.

  • But the most incredible specimen of them all,

  • the one that would change his life, took him totally by surprise.

  • It was in December 2006 at the annual Hamburg Fossil Fair.

  • Here the tables were laden with beautiful examples

  • of fossils and minerals to catch the public eye.

  • But Jorn didn't expect to find something for his museum on a stall.

  • The best specimens are never shown on a show.

  • They are always what we call "under the table".

  • So you need to know the dealers

  • to be shown the really, really, really good things.

  • The dealer, Thomas Perner, promised an extraordinary find.

  • When the dealer told me in the middle of the day

  • at a mineral show in Hamburg that I should join him for a drink

  • because he wanted to show me something,

  • I knew that it was something special.

  • Then he showed me some photographs and I was completely stunned.

  • And I didn't sleep for two nights after that,

  • because I knew that what I'd seen, it was probably

  • the most beautiful fossil I was ever going to see in my whole life.

  • Jorn made a home video of the very first moment

  • he came face to face with the fossil.

  • THEY LAUGH

  • Oh!

  • This is the best fossil and rarest fossil worldwide.

  • Wow!

  • Oh!

  • It's beautiful. It's beautiful.

  • Complete foot and two complete hands.

  • Yeah.

  • OK. Wow!

  • Yes!

  • Jorn believed he had stumbled across a 47-million-year-old treasure -

  • the perfectly preserved skeleton of a small creature,

  • more complete than he could ever hope for.

  • But his joy may be short-lived.

  • International fossil dealing is a cut-throat business.

  • Jorn must act swiftly if he wants to save it for science.

  • The thing about important fossils, there's a big black market and

  • there's a lot of private collectors, like with art and other things.

  • So a lot of important specimens are still locked in the basement of some rich guy or something like that.

  • So it needs to be in a public museum to be studied.

  • The asking price is over 1 million.

  • Jorn's got to be certain it's a genuine fossil and not a forgery.

  • He has it scientifically examined.

  • You can fake an outer surface of bone that looks really real,

  • but you cannot fake the inner structure of a bone.

  • It's impossible.

  • So getting an X-ray, you can see the inside of the bone.

  • You can see actually the bone marrow inside.

  • We know that it's 100% a real fossil.

  • There is no doubt at all.

  • The X-rays prove this fossil is genuine.

  • The necessary funds were secured and Jorn shipped it home.

  • In Norway's capital city, Oslo, in his museum lab,

  • Jorn finally gets to properly investigate his new treasure.

  • This is so complete that you cannot, even in your dreams,

  • wish for something being 47 million years old and this complete.

  • Usually, we only find teeth, broken parts of jaws

  • and small bones from the middle foot, maybe some toes and so on.

  • Just single, small bones from these animals this long ago.

  • Astonishingly, this fossil is not just bone.

  • Its level of preservation is extraordinary.

  • Here's an imprint of the bacteria that grew on the fur.

  • So actually we can see how much fur was there.

  • You cannot see the muscles or anything like that,

  • but you can see an outline of the body

  • that's bigger than just a skeleton.

  • You can actually see where the fur covered the animal

  • and how thick the fur was.

  • This unique fossil is so detailed

  • that it immediately reveals important information to Jorn.

  • The first thing I recognised was the big toe standing up like this,

  • 90 degrees to the rest of the foot.

  • And if you look very careful, to both the fingers and the toes,

  • you can see that there were nails and not claws.

  • This is a primate, just from seeing that image of that foot.

  • It was really a wake-up call for me.

  • Apes, monkeys and us all belong to one particular group of mammals,

  • the primates.

  • And the common feature we all share

  • is four fingers and an opposable thumb -

  • the characteristic we share with this 47-million-year-old fossil.

  • Could we be related?

  • Looking at the hand, you can see that it's got five fingers, of course,

  • and nails on all the fingers. But also the thumb is opposable like us,

  • so it can grasp things, it can hold things the same way we do today.

  • It's already there 47 million years ago.

  • It's a proper hand to hold around things.

  • To properly analyse the fossil, Jorn must share his secret.

  • He handpicks a small team of experts,

  • each a world leader in their discipline.

  • I knew immediately that this fossil was too important.

  • So I started to invite people in to make a dream team

  • around this fossil, to make the first description really proper.

  • If I would do it alone, I'm not an expert in primates,

  • but there are some good people around the world

  • and I invited the best ones to join me and they all said yes.

  • Dr Holly Smith is a dental anthropologist.

  • By studying the fossil's teeth, she will be able to determine

  • what the creature ate, its age and how it compares to other primates.

  • The fossil could be the ancestor

  • of prosimians and apes and monkeys and the lineage leading up to man.

  • Joining the team is Dr Jens Franzen, a renowned fossil expert

  • who's been waiting for an opportunity such as this.

  • This is by far the most complete

  • fossil primate ever found on the world.

  • And we have not only the complete skeleton,

  • but we have also the complete soft body outline

  • and we have the gut content. So what do you want more, ja?

  • Hi! It's nice to see you. How was the flight?

  • Professor Philip Gingerich is the next on board.

  • He's spent his life searching for links between early and modern mammals.

  • I suppose one of my initial thoughts was,

  • "This is a big job. This will be a lot of work."

  • Partly because there isn't anything else like it

  • and so it really deserves to be compared carefully

  • with all the various fragmentary fossils we have

  • and also with the skeletons of the living ones.

  • And you put all that together, that's a big work.

  • They plan a long and thorough study.

  • They must be certain of their conclusions

  • before they reveal the fossil to the world.

  • Until then, they will work in secret on their extraordinary treasure.

  • As soon as they start their analysis,

  • the fossil begins to come to life before their eyes.

  • The pelvic region, of course,

  • it's possible actually to tell the sex from this area.

  • In this region, you will expect to see a baculum or not.

  • All primates at that time possessed a penis bone, known as a baculum.

  • We now know from looking at the specimen

  • that there's no baculum present.

  • So this is a girl,

  • this is a small female that lived 47 million years ago.

  • The investigation is gathering pace.

  • The next question is where does she come from?

  • And it's the way her delicate body has been preserved,

  • and not her skeleton, that provides the answers.

  • There's only one locality in the world where this transfer technique,

  • that the fossils are put in this kind of polyester,

  • that all the fossils are prepared like this. This is the only place.

  • All the major primate fossil finds until now have been made in Africa.

  • But this one has been prepared using resin,

  • a technique used, not in Africa, but in Germany.

  • The fossil was found here, in a place known as the Messel Pit.

  • There is nowhere in the world like it.

  • It's an ancient crater filled with an unrivalled collection

  • of fossils, all dating from the Eocene Period, 47 million years ago.

  • It's like a peek-hole into a whole community,

  • a whole ecosystem in the Eocene.

  • That suddenly you see that everything you find usually

  • as small pieces of things, you have complete

  • in this one locality, one place in the world

  • and that's something that palaeontologists really, really treasure.

  • So this is like a holy grail for palaeontology.

  • Dinosaurs were long extinct.

  • The shales of Messel had already yielded fossil birds,

  • reptiles and amphibians,

  • complete with the impression of their feathers, scales and skin.

  • The biggest ants ever known

  • and beetles, still with their colour after millions of years.

  • Preserved in incredible detail are bats,

  • snakes and even a miniature horse the size of a small dog.

  • The first glimpses of kinds of creatures that are alive today.

  • The Eocene Period is really the critical stage for mammal evolution.

  • It's when all the old-timers, they are still around

  • and the newcomers are coming strongly into the field.

  • We have the first horses, the first carnivores,

  • the first bats, the first whales. All these new mammals are evolving

  • in the Eocene and, of course, the primates, they are thriving.

  • But which were our ancestors?

  • Until now, no complete primate has ever been found in the Messel Pit,

  • and even this specimen was almost lost forever.

  • Fossil hunters have dug in the Messel Pit for generations,

  • collecting and selling the specimens as works of art,

  • just such a fossil hunter must have dug this primate from the shale.

  • Who this was is still a mystery, but we do know they took her away,

  • perfectly preserved her in resin

  • and locked her away from view for 25 years.

  • It's like having your unknown Rembrandt,

  • your unknown Van Gogh, at home.

  • You can see it every day. The rest of the world don't know about it.

  • And it makes you kind of feel powerful I think to have something like that.

  • Fortunately, now she's with Jorn,

  • her secrets can be revealed to the world and the team in Oslo

  • are starting to examine and describe her skeleton bone by bone.

  • By why are fossils from the Messel Pit so well preserved?

  • It's thanks to the formation of the Messel Pit 50 million years ago.

  • Deep underground, molten rock, magma, forced its way upwards.

  • Just below the surface, it meant a layer of ground water.

  • Superheated steam generated incredible pressure.

  • The rock was ripped apart.

  • A series of massive explosions

  • created a crater a mile wide.

  • Inside its steep walls, an incredibly deep lake formed.

  • It was probably at least 100m deep and the waters were still.

  • When animals fell in,

  • they drifted down and were soon covered by mud at the bottom.

  • There was no oxygen and few bacteria to induce decay.

  • Undisturbed for millions of years,

  • the bodies, buried under tonnes of mud, were squashed flat.

  • It is the Messel Pit's extraordinary geological history

  • that allows Jorn to pinpoint exactly when this fossil lived.

  • The start of this whole lake, where the fossil was found,

  • that was a volcanic explosion, and parts of that volcanics

  • that came out in the explosion, they are like time capsules.

  • And it's possible to date the radioactive isotopes

  • in such volcanic rocks very, very precisely.

  • And this has been done for this volcanics and it's 47 million years.

  • Despite the millions of years that have passed since these animals were alive,

  • their bodies have been preserved in such detail

  • that they give us a full picture of their world.

  • The preservation at Messel really brings things to life and you can

  • really get a feel for this as an animal and not just as something...

  • A pile of bones, long dead.

  • Eocene Europe was very different than it is today.

  • Continents have drifted, sea levels changed.

  • Then the world's climate was more humid and tropical.

  • The primates' home around the lake was a lush, tropical rainforest,

  • a green canopy of trees stretched as far as the eye could see.

  • In the skies were birds and bats.

  • On the ground,

  • new kinds of furry, warm-blooded creatures were flourishing,

  • the early mammals.

  • This is where our fossil lived out her life as a prehistoric primate.

  • She lived in a dense jungle of tall trees and vines.

  • As the team continue to examine her skeleton,

  • they're able to deduce how she lived.

  • All through looking at the skeleton, we can be for sure

  • that it was living on trees because when you are looking at the thumb

  • and also at the big toe of the feet,

  • you can see that these were grasping hands and grasping feet.

  • So these were feet constructed for

  • an animal living on trees, evidently, ja. No doubt about that.

  • It's possible to say something about the size of the muscles

  • from the attachment points on the bones.

  • What's special about this small skeleton is really that both

  • the arms and legs are quite short and quite strong for such a small animal.

  • So probably she had quite a lot of muscles.

  • This new information adds to the picture the team are building

  • of a strong, muscular creature living high in the tree tops of the Eocene rainforest.

  • But what did she eat?

  • To understand precisely what she ate,

  • the team look at her teeth.

  • Dr Holly Smith is an internationally renowned dental anthropologist.

  • She wants to see inside the fossil's mouth,

  • but it's been firmly shut for 47 million years.

  • Only detailed X-rays have enabled her

  • to examine the shape and structure of the fossil's teeth.

  • So the Messel primate has a nice, kind of general primate dentition

  • that could do a little of everything.

  • She's got a little bit of an incising surface.

  • She's going to have plenty of piercing teeth.

  • She has molars that are general but have some kind of slicing edges.

  • And we would expect that a real primate, a real arboreal primate,

  • would be eating probably fruit and leaves

  • and maybe supplementing that with insects.

  • This extraordinary preservation is not restricted to her teeth.

  • As well as the fur, there are other delicate details

  • that provide information which never ceases to astonish them.

  • What's amazing about this specimen is also that

  • we can actually see its gut contents.

  • It's the last meal preserved in this small female.

  • Even with this nugget of petrified treasure,

  • decoding the fossil's secrets doesn't come easy.

  • But Jens manages to puzzle it out.

  • Before I had seen that several times and I thought all the time,

  • "Oh, that's a scale of a fish quite common in Messel."

  • And then I saw the cell structure

  • and I realised, "Oh, no! This must be the remnant of a plant."

  • And then looking at the morphometry and at the form of that particle,

  • it became immediately clear that this can only be a seed, ja.

  • So it seems that just before she died,

  • this tree-dwelling primate fed on fruits, seeds and leaves.

  • As the team examined the X-rays in more detail,

  • something just isn't adding up.

  • They've realised that her jaw held

  • an extraordinarily large number of teeth.

  • This is the radiograph from this side and you see

  • the drawing of the teeth matches pretty well.

  • The team have a real puzzle on their hands.

  • They're going to need more than a standard X-ray to solve it.

  • The Senckenberg Institute in Germany

  • specialises in high-end computer tomography, CT scanning.

  • Images of the rotating fossil are recorded and manipulated

  • by powerful computers, which, just like a CAT scan in a hospital,

  • create an image of the fossil's jaw in 3-D.

  • Then we've taken X-rays and so you can get

  • the shadows of what's behind what you can see.

  • And then in the last year, we've done computerised tomography,

  • where you literally... you project X-rays

  • in a way that literally slices the fossil into many, many, many slices

  • and made into a three-dimensional image,

  • so you can literally step through from the front to the back.

  • You can even manipulate the CT scan so that you see

  • what you're looking at, not from the front, but from the back.

  • It's as if there are no secrets.

  • The best person to help analyse such phenomenally detailed

  • three-dimensional images is the scanner supervisor

  • Dr Jorg Habersetzer.

  • Here is the region of the molars.

  • And if we zoom in, which is not possible on normal CTs,

  • we see all the details preserved in three dimensions.

  • So we can follow up all ridges

  • and the cusp of the teeth in a three-dimensional way.

  • This computer tomography has revealed something extraordinary.

  • You can also see, for example on this assemblage,

  • that the second molar here has not evolved complete roots,

  • whereas in the first molar we have here already very solid roots.

  • Here is the answer to why they found so many teeth in the fossil's mouth.

  • She has her baby teeth as well as her unerupted adult's teeth

  • still buried in her jaw.

  • This primate was a youngster.

  • So this Messel primate was caught at a really interesting

  • and very distinctive time in her life.

  • She's clearly no longer an infant,

  • but she's not grown up.

  • She's a juvenile. She might be, let's say, very roughly comparable

  • to something in a human like a child somewhere between six and 12.

  • It was a girl, a small girl, which had this tragic end

  • there in the crater lake of Messel 47 million years ago, ja.

  • She's in a developmental phase that looks very much like

  • a six-year-old human in comparison

  • and I'm so lucky that I have a daughter that's five-years-old

  • and she's starting to shed her teeth just now.

  • So we decided, after some discussion,

  • to name the fossil, to name this wonderful little primate, Ida,

  • because that's the name of my daughter.

  • LITTLE GIRL LAUGHS

  • So Jorn now has two Idas in his life.

  • One five-years-old and one 47 million.

  • At this point in the investigation, they've gathered so much information

  • that it's possible to fully reconstruct her ancient skeleton.

  • Her 47-million-year-old remains

  • can be brought to life in the 21st-century virtual world.

  • Laser scanners, combined with the computerised tomography,

  • produce a digital code of her body,

  • which, once processed, creates an accurate 3-D model.

  • We are able, using these tools, to see Ida as never before.

  • Ida is a warm-blooded creature covered in thick fur.

  • She was just under a metre long, including her tail,

  • which she used for balance as she scampered on all fours

  • through the rainforest canopy.

  • Her opposable thumbs and toes gripped the branches.

  • Ida was probably active at night.

  • Like us, her two large, forward-facing eyes

  • gave her excellent stereoscopic vision.

  • The team's extensive analysis, combined with X-rays and CT scans,

  • have brought them a long way in understanding Ida.

  • The investigation is however far from over.

  • There are still many questions to answer.

  • Most importantly,

  • how significant is she to our understanding of our evolution?

  • Does she belong on the evolutionary branch that leads to us?

  • The Eocene Period in which she lived

  • was a crucial time in the history of life.

  • Without the developments that happened, we would not exist now.

  • At some point during this new dawn,

  • the primates split into two major groups.

  • The prosimians, the non-human branch,

  • which still survive mainly as modern lemurs.

  • The other branch, the anthropoids,

  • developed into monkeys, apes

  • and, ultimately, us, humans.

  • Well, the advance of having a skeleton this complete

  • is hopefully it will let us make the connection to what came later.

  • In a sense, studying primate evolution is all about

  • looking at the diversity living today and tracing that back through time.

  • We're interested here to see how apes and monkeys trace back.

  • How lemurs trace back.

  • And which of these, or all of them, can we find in the Eocene.

  • But what is Ida?

  • Is she our ancestor or is she on the non-human line, a lemur?

  • Any partial primate remains discovered at Messel so far

  • have been described as lemurs.

  • The first guess, of course, because of the other specimens that's found

  • from the Messel locality is to say, "OK, this is a primitive lemur."

  • Most lemurs are the size of monkeys

  • and have similar habits and lifestyles.

  • But they are an evolutionary side branch.

  • They've hardly changed fundamentally in 47 million years.

  • If Ida is closely related to modern lemurs,

  • then she cannot be a human ancestor.

  • It's a critical stage of the investigation.

  • It's really important to compare this fossil to living lemurs

  • because living lemurs have many not so advanced traits.

  • And a lot of the traits that we see in lemurs today

  • is the same things that we should look for in the Eocene,

  • when all primates were really primitive.

  • Dental expert Dr Holly Smith is at Duke Lemur Centre in North Carolina.

  • This is the world's largest research centre for the non-human line

  • of primates and here they have a great variety of them,

  • including tarsiers, loris and lemurs.

  • Is there one that is particularly similar to Ida?

  • The Messel primate isn't exactly like anything living

  • and one of the questions is, is it general enough

  • to have been a possible ancestor for the higher primates,

  • the apes and monkeys and perhaps these animals, too?

  • Or was it already specially off on a line to lemurs?

  • But if you want to study one of these creatures, there's a problem.

  • Getting it to keep still.

  • Fortunately, this loris is being examined under sedation by the centre's vet.

  • And we're doing a physical exam, his annual physical exam, under sedation.

  • By having a really close look at this animal,

  • we can see characteristics that proves it is not our close relative.

  • Most of their toes have toenails like we would have,

  • but this second digit has a long grooming claw.

  • All lower primates have such a grooming claw on the hind foot.

  • They can use that for grooming their fur

  • and you can see a primate's got a really lush, thick coat of fur

  • and keeping that in condition is important.

  • The vet continues by checking this creature's teeth,

  • Holly's particular expertise.

  • He reveals another important characteristic

  • that places it on the non-human branch of evolution.

  • So he has the upper incisors here, the canines, and then on the bottom,

  • his incisors and canines form this tooth comb.

  • These animals have unusual front teeth in their lower jaw.

  • Where we and apes and monkeys have separate front teeth,

  • these creatures have a tooth comb.

  • Some of the lemur's specialisation is used for getting food,

  • but it's also used for grooming fur and grooming each other.

  • The big question for Jorn and the team is,

  • does Ida belong with them or with us?

  • Does she have the grooming claw and a tooth comb?

  • So looking at this toe here,

  • certainly, it's just as wide as the others.

  • There's not a pointy toe tip,

  • like you expect in lemurs when there's a toilet claw present.

  • There's nothing like this here.

  • This is also nail-bearing.

  • One of the other main lemur traits is, of course, a tooth comb.

  • And we would expect this, of course, in the front of the snout

  • and there's no tooth comb here at all.

  • There's nothing like that in this specimen.

  • Ida's skeleton is over 95% complete, so the team know

  • that these features haven't been lost in collection or preparation.

  • Put simply, she never possessed them.

  • Unlike the other fossils found in the ancient Messel Pit,

  • she is not a lemur.

  • She must be a member of another group.

  • Could she be in a group connected to us?

  • In the beginning, we all thought

  • we are just dealing with a certain kind of fossil lemur

  • and, step by step, our ideas changed

  • and more and more anthropoid traits

  • turned up and now we are really thinking of relationships

  • to anthropoids, to hominoids finally and at the end to man.

  • The team have shown that Ida is not on the lemur line of evolution.

  • But is she on the human line?

  • Jorn and the team want to look to the forests of East Africa

  • and our closest relative, the chimpanzee.

  • If we look at the anthropoid primates, we have to go to Africa

  • to look at chimpanzees to see something that's more advanced,

  • more specialised, in a way that's a little bit more like human traits.

  • It's wonderful. You can compare them

  • and you can compare their skeletal features with Ida.

  • Ida shares the classic primate characteristics with chimps.

  • They are quadrupeds,

  • walking on all fours, as she would have done in the ancient forest.

  • Strikingly, their hands and feet are almost identical -

  • five fingers and five toes.

  • And her opposable big toe, the trait that first identified her to Jorn

  • as a primate, is mirrored in the chimpanzees.

  • It enables both of them to grasp tree branches and climb.

  • Looking at modern-day chimpanzees

  • and looking at the foot of a chimpanzee

  • and looking at especially the ankle bones,

  • they are so much the same as in the fossil.

  • At this stage of the investigation,

  • Ida is showing some basic human-like characteristics in her skeleton,

  • but her body proportions and the length of her fingers

  • are nonetheless lemur-like.

  • The picture is still unclear.

  • It is, broadly speaking, a lemur monkey.

  • How lemur it is and how monkey it is, is what we're trying to figure out.

  • And so...

  • it looks to me like it ties

  • higher primates, apes and monkeys,

  • into something in the Eocene that's clearly more primitive.

  • The team are looking for any clear evidence in Ida's anatomy that links her to us.

  • This is not an easy task.

  • Establishing these links has always been a problem

  • since the theory of evolution was first proposed.

  • 150 years ago, Charles Darwin explained the incredible diversity

  • of life on earth in a new way.

  • There are billions of species on the planet,

  • but each was not individually and uniquely created.

  • New species appeared as they adapted to a changing environment.

  • At the time, Darwin's proposal was controversial.

  • He argued that monkeys, apes and ourselves have a common ancestor.

  • That ancestor, we now know,

  • must have lived hundreds of millions of years ago.

  • Darwin's idea was revolutionary

  • and he was ridiculed by many in Victorian society.

  • "Where is the proof?" his critics demanded.

  • "Where is the half ape, half man fossil

  • "that links us to ape-like ancestors?

  • "And where is the even more ancient fossil

  • "that links apes and ourselves to the rest of the animal kingdom?"

  • Darwin predicted that such creatures must have existed,

  • but he never could produce the fossil evidence.

  • It was missing.

  • Don Johanson is famous as the man who found

  • what the world had been waiting for, one of those missing links.

  • In the Ethiopian desert in 1974, as a young man,

  • he uncovered the fossilised bones of an astonishing creature.

  • He nicknamed it Lucy.

  • Incredible. Just remarkable.

  • Well, what we're looking at here is about 40% of a single skeleton,

  • of course, the Lucy skeleton, which I found in 1974.

  • And what's astonishing about it is we have parts of the upper limbs,

  • the arms, we have parts of the lower limbs,

  • both the thigh and the shin bone.

  • Parts of the vertebral column, the backbone, and even the ribs.

  • And when we mount her like this, when we make a display like this,

  • one gets the impression of the body.

  • Lucy looked like an ape,

  • but she was beginning to show human characteristics in her skeleton.

  • She turned out to be an extraordinary link in our own evolution.

  • Finding Lucy, of course, it's a fantastic fossil

  • that shows the upright position, the standing position,

  • the walking of the first human-like ancestors.

  • So she's a hallmark because she walks like us.

  • One of the things that Lucy gives us

  • is a real picture of what her pelvis looked like.

  • The pelvis is obviously one of the most crucial

  • anatomical regions in the body for the way animals get around.

  • For example, if we look at an animal that walks on all fours,

  • a quadruped, and in this case it's a chimpanzee,

  • you can see that the hip bones - it's the one we feel just here -

  • as you can see, are facing forwards.

  • Whereas in humans, like ourselves, they have been rotated around

  • so that the muscles on the back are now on the side.

  • They're no longer facing backwards.

  • And they stabilise the hip.

  • So that when we walk, we walk as a striding gait.

  • If you watch a chimpanzee walk bipedally,

  • it walks like this, cos it's always collapsing.

  • So animals that walk on all fours, like chimpanzees and Ida,

  • have a very different hip bone to animals that walk on two, like us.

  • But it was the shape of Lucy's bones

  • that revealed an amazing fact about our own evolution.

  • If you look at Lucy's pelvis, right here -

  • we've reconstructed this side for the mirror image -

  • it's not identical to a modern human.

  • But clearly, it's shorter, broader

  • and these blades, the hip bones, have been rotated around.

  • So this is a clear adaptation to upright walking on the ground.

  • Lucy had ape characteristics.

  • She was hairy, like a chimpanzee.

  • But she also had human characteristics.

  • She walked on two legs, just as we do.

  • Lucy was the half ape/half man species that Darwin predicted.

  • But where was the link millions of years earlier

  • between us and the rest of the animal kingdom?

  • At this stage of the investigation, Ida's skeleton is showing

  • a mixture of characteristics from the non-human and human line.

  • This unusual combination is bringing Jorn and the team closer

  • to deciding whether she is related to us.

  • This jumble of different characters, it's very, very exciting,

  • because you see things that are more anthropoid like.

  • You see things that are certainly extremely primitive.

  • You see things that maybe should be more like a lemur.

  • And you see all these characters in the same skeleton

  • and you need to try to explain evolution in a new way,

  • the early evolution of primates, in a new way, because it's there.

  • You cannot take them away.

  • This is really one specimen that's frozen in time

  • and all these characters are there.

  • Jorn and the team are getting closer to proving

  • that Ida is the ancestor of all monkeys, apes and humans.

  • But they need to find final proof of that in her skeleton.

  • Lucy's pelvis gave Johanson the proof of an ape/man.

  • Finding an equivalent bone to link Ida to us is much more difficult.

  • 3.2 million years of evolution separate us from Lucy.

  • But 47 million separate us from Ida.

  • That's an immense length of time.

  • Jorn and the team start scrutinising every inch of Ida's body,

  • when suddenly they are distracted by something that tells them,

  • not about OUR evolutionary story, but about HER personal story.

  • Dr Jens Franzen was analysing Ida's wrist when he noticed something

  • that suggests she may have suffered an injury in her young life.

  • Suddenly I saw the small fragments of bone and this

  • fine structure on the surface, which is typical for a bone.

  • And so it was like a lightning at that point. "Ah, yes!"

  • But really here, really it's possible to see it.

  • Because the bone is in small, small pieces fused together

  • at the end of the wrist. Yeah. It's not a nodule.

  • It's not something that was formed after the animal was dead. Right.

  • This is something that happened to her while she was still alive.

  • What Jens found in the wrist, it's quite amazing, because

  • it looks like the wrist here is broken and it's partly healed again.

  • And when it healed, it was a lot of new bone

  • forming on top of the joint for the hand. So her right hand

  • was not functioning very well after this accident.

  • Research on her bones has thrown up a tragic surprise.

  • The lump on her right wrist shows that she broke it very badly early in her life.

  • Maybe she was dropped by her mother.

  • The wrist continued to grow, but it was badly deformed.

  • Her hand didn't work well

  • and the team believe she might not have been able to climb properly.

  • She was probably forced to forage for food on the ground.

  • And tragically for the injured Ida,

  • the volcanic forces that formed the Messel lake were still active.

  • They played a crucial role in her demise.

  • The still waters of the lake were often covered

  • by a low-lying blanket of gas, a poisonous but undetectable

  • layer of carbon dioxide seeping from the ground.

  • She was thirsty and so she went to the lake shore and tried

  • to drink there, not realising that this was a bad day for her,

  • because at that day such a poisonous gas layer had developed

  • and so she must have lost immediately consciousness

  • and then she fell into the water and she drowned.

  • Sinking quickly through the waters, she slid into the mud,

  • deep below the surface, where she lay for 47 million years.

  • The bone in Ida's wrist has given the team an extraordinary personal story to Ida's death.

  • But they're still looking for a bone to link her with us.

  • They have exhaustively studied her skeleton

  • throughout a long investigation.

  • They're hoping she might be linked to our own ancestral line.

  • It's been a long journey describing this fossil.

  • From the start, where we all really believed strongly

  • that she's a fantastic fossil but she's related to lemurs,

  • until we now after unwinding one character after the other,

  • finding that this doesn't fit, this doesn't fit. This is something else.

  • And looking at it now,

  • it looks so much more exciting even than a complete lemur.

  • This is something much more important also for our own evolution.

  • Jorn and the team still need to find

  • that one conclusive piece of evidence that will allow them

  • to be sure that she is our relative. It's only after two years of work

  • that they make a startling new discovery.

  • This is even shorter.

  • There is a bone in Ida's foot

  • that links her with every person on the planet.

  • It could be the evidence that the first small adaptations

  • towards walking upright happened 47 million years ago.

  • The ankle born, the so-called talus in the Messel primate,

  • shows exactly the evidence which we see still in ourselves,

  • in human beings of today.

  • Except that, of course, our bones are much bigger now.

  • But they show the same kind of articulation, ja.

  • A tiny bone in her ankle, the talus,

  • is shaped like that of a modern human.

  • It is critical in connecting the leg to the foot

  • and is key for bearing weight.

  • This is crucial in making it possible to walk upright.

  • Its shape is restricted to monkeys, apes and humans.

  • The lemurs and the other prosimians

  • have a bone of a completely different shape.

  • The shape of this bone tells something about the movement of the foot.

  • And the movement of the foot of primates

  • is quite different in different groups and this particular shape

  • on the talus bone, it's very, very much like humans.

  • This shaped foot bone makes Ida one of us.

  • Our 47-million-year-old relative.

  • We are really dealing with

  • a very, very early root of anthropoids at Messel, ja.

  • Ida comes from a crucial point in our evolution,

  • when the early primates split into the human and non-human groups.

  • She is a fusion of both.

  • She is a transitional species, a link that is now no longer missing.

  • It tells a part of our evolution that's been hidden so far.

  • It's been hidden because all the other specimens are so incomplete.

  • They're so broken, there's nothing almost to study.

  • And now this wonderful fossil appears

  • and it makes the story so much easier to tell.

  • And so it's really a dream come true.

  • We could all be descended from Ida.

  • Jorn and his team believe they have discovered our earliest, complete primate ancestor.

  • And remarkably,

  • exactly 150 years after Darwin put forward the proposition

  • that human beings were part of the rest of animal life,

  • here at last we have a link which connects us

  • with, not only the apes and monkeys,

  • but also with the entire animal kingdom.

  • This fossil turns out to be really important for us, as humans.

  • This fossil is really a part of our history.

  • Truly, a fossil that's a world heritage.

  • This is the first link to human evolution,

  • long before we started to divide into different ethnic groups.

  • A find like this is something for all human kind.

  • Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

  • E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk

For two years,

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