The link : uncovering our earliest ancestor /

While the 150th anniversary of "On the Origin of Species" is being feted this year, Darwin's older relative Ida has become a media star as well. Ida, to be clear, is the 47-million-year-old lemurlike fossil unveiled this past spring, who may be our oldest known primate ancestor. Then again, she may not be. The team that brought Ida to light, led by the Norwegian paleontologist Jörn Hurum, has been touting Ida as a "missing link" between human predecessors and other early primates. In "The Link," part of Ida's floodlit public debut (along with a documentary and a media tour), Hurum's colleague Jens Franzen says Ida's impact will be "like an asteroid hitting the earth." But other scientists are wary of these claims, arguing that Ida may be a distant cousin, not a direct human ancestor. This book is a compromise between promoting the fossil and conceding the uncertainties around it. Tudge gamely outlines the relevant environmental, geological and paleontological history, and notes the provisional nature of many hypotheses involving fossils; and in separate chapters, Young describes Ida's discovery and reception. What's largely missing from "The Link," however, is Ida. There are only brief sections analyzing the fossil's characteristics and evolutionary implications. For now, Ida is less a link than an outlier, the most complete primate fossil of her time. Vivid as Ida appears, the meaning we extract from any one fossil necessarily depends on the presence of others. There are no solo shows in evolution, just ensemble performances.