You are going to nationalgeographic.com/tv and different terms of use and privacy policy will apply.
Cast your mind back to June, when a stunning fossil animal called Darwinius (alternatively Idaor “The Link”) was unveiled to the world to tremendous pomp and circumstance. Hyperbolic ads declared the day of Ida’s discovery as the most important for 47 million years. A press release promised that she would “change everything”, headlines proclaimed her a “missing link in evolution” and the scientists behind the discovery billed her as “the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor“.
And according to a new study, none of that is true. Mere months later, Erik Seiffertfrom Stony Brook University has done a comprehensive analysis of the bones of 117 primates, both living and extinct, which throws Ida’s supposed direct line of ancestry to humans into serious doubt.
Central to this new work is a new fossil called Afradapis, a member of the same group of extinct primates – the adapids – that Darwinius belonged to. The two were closely related but separated by around 10 million years. Like its more famous cousin, Afradapsis‘s jaw and teeth contain features that are similar...
Copyright © 1996-2015 National Geographic Society.
Copyright © 2015-2021 National Geographic Partners, LLC. All rights reserved