• Question: do you think we will ever find the missing link?

    Asked by miri22 to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 26 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      Hi miri22,

      The actual process for a bone to become fossillised requires an awful lot of luck, we need the body to be buried quickly in such a way that it doesn’t get decomposed as would normally happen by small bacteria and microbes.

      But, there should be enough remains around, that we will eventually find the skeleton we are looking for, that is the missing link in the genetic tree between Apes and Homonids (our line of ancestors). However, it is also possible that this is a moving target and when we find one skeleton, we’ll realise we need another one instead, so it may be quite a search.

      It is though, really interesting to read about where humans came from and what changed and when. A big driver in this was probably changes in the climate, which reduced global forest cover and forced some apes to leave trees, with the species standing tallest able to see predators coming in the grasses and escape, while shorter versions died out.

    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      Hi miri,

      There are already lots of missing links! We have fossil evidence from lots of pre-human ancestors that charts their evolution from apes to man (like Neanderthals, and Australopithecus, for example). Unfortunately these species have gone extinct, so all we have now are humans, and apes, and none of the links in between.

      So people think that some of these missing links might still be alive (like the big-foot and yeti legends), but there’s no scientific evidence for this. All our ancestors that link us back to the apes have gone extinct, but we have lots of fossil evidence to show how we evolved to be the way we are now.

    • Photo: Nuala Carson

      Nuala Carson answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      The missing link………

      There are lots of missing links! Science is connecting up the knowledge we have all scientists discover some sort of missing link. I will discover the missing link for my problem but there will many many more to discover after that!

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