THE MISSING LINK IN HUMAN EVOLUTION FOR FREE

It was a female that was less than a year old but had been weaned and had developing teeth. The study, led by Norway’s Professor Jorn Hurum, says the fossil is so well-preserved that its soft tissues and stomach contents can be analysed.Ĭhristened Darwinius masillae, it belonged to an extinct group of primates which lived in rainforests. The BBC programme is based on a scientific study to be published by the Public Library of Science, a leading academic journal with offices in Cambridge and San Francisco. CNN When I was training to be a journalist, the best piece of advice I got was KISS keep it simple, stupid.

THE MISSING LINK IN HUMAN EVOLUTION FOR FREE

To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here. A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Wonder Theory newsletter. The team who examined the young female animal say it has some resemblance to a lemur, a mammal with a distinctive tail that is found to this day in the forests of Madagascar.īut Sir David’s documentary will explain that the researchers have, controversially, concluded the fossil ‘is not simply a lemur’ but from a related group of primates which evolved into monkeys, apes and human beings. The surprisingly simple technique that can turn deserts green. Surely, missing links understood as gaps in the fossil. The fossilised bones, which are thought to be between 37 and 47million years old, were found in Germany’s Messel Shale Pit, a disused quarry near Frankfurt famous for its fossils. In popular culture, the missing link is all that, epitomized as the ultimate proof of human evolution. And technically speaking, each one of those parents that we don't have a fossil for is a missing link. We don't know if any given fossil is a parent to humans, or a cousin or an odd uncle. The centrepiece of the programme is the unveiling of the first-ever complete skeleton of an extinct animal called an adapid. We have a few hundred human ancestor fossils from a chain that is several million years long.

Let's call these A (for the extinct one) and E (for the living one) An evolution denier comes to you and says 'Aha, you don't have the organ. You have an organism that is alive today, and its purported ancestor from 6 million years ago. The 90-minute programme is top secret but The Mail on Sunday has learned from sources in America that the results of the study on which it is based will be revealed by a team of scientists and broadcasters in New York on May 19. Answer (1 of 87): Imagine you are an evolutionary biologist.

The BBC has made an extraordinary new documentary, presented by Sir David Attenborough, which will reveal the discovery of a fossilised skeleton that may be a vital ‘missing link’ in human evolution.

The missing link in human evolution