47 Million-year-old Relative
A discovery was made in Messel shale pit near Frankfurt in Germany of a 47 million-year-old
skeleton that makes clearer our path of Darwinian evolution. Her name is Ida. She has fingers, fingernails, thumbs, big toes, and feet with human characteristics including a talus or anklebone with a shape specific to the ability to bear weight on the foot in upright walking like we have. That is an important evolutionary adaptation that links her to us. We know she is female from the lack of a baculum bone in the pelvis.
She lived back in the Eocene era when the main stem of early primates split into two different groups. The Anthropoids that evolved into monkeys, apes, and humans is one. The other one is Prosimians which live on as lemurs today on the island and surrounding islands of Madagascar where they are not displaced by competition from monkeys and apes. There have been giant lemur skulls found in Madagascar that are bigger than gorilla skulls. The bodies of those lemurs were built much like modern koala.
Ida is a lemur-like creature but she lacks lemur features like the toilet or grooming claws on the feet and the toothcomb on the bottom jaw, which is also used for grooming. She represents what our ancestors were like before the primate split took place.
Nature has written a record of history. It is a history of evolution and it is shown by the fossils. The fishibian fossil shows the transition from fish to amphibian. The frogamander fossil shows the transition from amphibian to reptile. Ida is one such transitional fossil as she has traits from both groups of Prosimians and Anthropoids.
Prosimians branched out to lemurs and loris. Anthropoids brought us New World monkeys, Old World monkeys, apes, chimpanzee, and humans. Of all the current living primates in the modern world, chimpanzees are the most like humans.
Let's trace our fossil record back to Ida from us. We are Homo Sapiens, before us were Archaic Homo Sapiens, then Homo Ergaster, Homo Erectus, Homo Habilis, Australopithecus Afarensis and Australopithecus Anaminsis, all of which walked upright on two feet. Continuing on down there were Ardipithecus, Kenyapithecus, Proconsul, and Aegyptopithecus. Before that we come to Ida in what is called Darwinius Massillae.
That is going back 47 million years. Humans split off from the predecessors of gorillas and chimpanzees about 6 million years ago and started walking on two feet somewhere around 4 million years ago with Australopithecus. The first Homo species appeared 2.5 million years ago and Homo Sapiens came on the scene about 200,000 years ago.
Missing only her left rear leg, Ida is a 95% complete fossil and 15 times older than Lucy is. Lucy is a 40% complete 3.2 million-year-old Anthropoid skeleton discovered in Ethiopia. The shape of a pelvis found in transition from ape to human is that the hipbones are at the back for quadruped movement in apes and is most suited to climbing trees. For bipedal locomotion like we now enjoy without having to lean from side to side with every step, the hipbones are rotated around to the sides to facilitate steady walking in the upright position. Lucy stood upright walking on two feet and shows the period when apes were really starting to resemble humans.
Several human species have come and gone, but we Homo Sapiens have remained. We walk upright since we no longer live in trees, leaving our hands free to do more intricate things. We wear clothes to compensate for the hair covering we no longer have, and we are able to think and reason and trace the lineage of all of us back to a very great great great great grand aunt named Ida.
by: Ryan Round
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