Darwinium masillae

Our series attempts to locate when and where we transitioned into truly modern human beings — the elusive spark, if you will, that allowed us, here on our own tiny branch on the tree of life, to behave the way we do with all our various abilities and features. Part of this quest involves closely examining our direct ancient lineage, as well as our near and not-so-near cousins. Of course evolutionary history is filled with groups that split into various descendant lines as well as those that hit dead ends and fizzled out. These ancient family trees are pieced together through the fossil record. Looking at the various branches on these trees is one way scientists try to figure out the relationships between various animal ancestors and us.

Recent publications about a fossil called Ida provide the latest example of a creature that seems to have lived at one of those branching points where one group of animals was evolving into a recognizably different one. People in the media have jumped all over this beautifully preserved 47-million-year-old fossil, with some even calling it a “missing link.” Of course, there’s never a single missing link in the huge web of animal evolution, but it does appear that Ida, or Darwinium masillae, was a mammal who shared characteristics with the prosimians (such as lemurs) and also with anthropoids (such as monkeys and apes). Keep in mind, there’s a long, long time — and lots of evolution! — between when Ida lived and when our own species appeared on earth maybe 200,000 years ago.

What do you think of all the media hoopla about Ida and what she means?

• Research article: “Complete Primate Skeleton from the Middle Eocene of Messel in Germany: Morphology and Paleobiology“
• Associated Press: “Early Skeleton Sheds Light on Primate Evolution“
• CNN: “Scientists Piece Together Human Ancestry“
• The Independent (UK): “The Big Question: Is ‘Ida’ really the missing link between humans and animals?“

Belgian archeologist Michel Toussaint, with the Neanderthal skull photo © Larry Engel, 2008

Hi, I’m Graham Chedd, who with Alan Alda first came up with the idea for The Human Spark a couple of years ago. We’ve just finished our first shoot, so this is a good moment to begin what will be a regular series of blogs as the production makes its way to your PBS station, we hope some time next year.

Alan will chime in soon. But on this first shoot, while I was in Grenoble, France, filming a 50,000 year-old Neanderthal skull getting its teeth X-rayed, Alan was lying in a tube in Los Angeles having his head scanned – so that we can all peer into his brain later.

Here’s Belgian archaeologist Michel Toussaint holding the fragile Neanderthal skull at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble. Normally it resides under lock and key at the national archaeology museum in Paris. The photo was taken by Larry Engel, by the way. Larry is The Human Spark’s director, and will also be the cameraman for most of the filming

The big question we’re trying to answer in the first show of The Human Spark is how, when, where and why we got to be who we are from who we used to be. Humans that looked much like us existed some 200,000 years ago, but the first obvious evidence of people with minds like ours – people we’d recognize as us – dates to about 35,000 years ago, when they started painting the walls of caves in Europe, like the famous Lascaux caves in France. We want to know where these people – and their minds – came from.

More on that in later blogs (hint: much of the story takes place in Africa). But this first shoot was with researchers seeking the answer to a simple question: how long did it take Neanderthals to grow up?

The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility photo © Larry Engel, 2008

Neanderthals had been living in Europe and getting along just fine for at least 100,000 years before our ancestors showed up. Then the Neanderthals disappeared. Just how and why we replaced them – what gave us the edge – is one of the most fascinating mysteries of archeology, and one we’ll be diving into in this show. But one intriguing idea is that our ancestors had longer childhoods than did Neanderthals, and so more time to absorb all the complicated stuff we need to learn.

So how do you find out how quickly Neanderthals grew up? That’s where this machine comes in – a giant particle accelerator that generates one of the most powerful and concentrated beam of X-rays in the world – and a machine that I managed, in an act of stunning stupidity, to shut down entirely.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. More on that next time.