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ORIGINS OF MAN?

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.

THE LINK
UNCOVERING OUR EARLIEST ANCESTOR

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 that:
"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.

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