‘Ida’ 20 May 2009

Today the world’s press is dominated by news of Ida, who if nothing else, is an astonishingly well-preserved fossil. Of course she is claimed to be more than that: what the popular media still wants to name THE missing link, as if there could ever be such an exalted piece of the puzzle. As Henry Gee has made admirably clear in his books, and in the media today, the phrase is virtually meaningless. In the deep time of evolution there are so many strands of descent – nearly all the evidence of which is missing – that the best we can hope for is to discover ever closer cousinship. Even if we did find some fossil of a direct human ancestor, it’s not at all clear how we could know that that was what we were looking at. Ida arrives with the most amazing modern story – like a script for a film -  already attached to her. Modern fossil hunting seems like a throw back to the days when aristocrats and sharpsters (often both embodied in the same person) simply appropriated foreign treasures. That this fossil was dug up over ten years ago is one of the many intriguing aspects of this news story. Fossils, it seems, belong to those who first find them. Amazing, too, that there are collectors who keep these fossils secret. It made me think of those rich closeted owners of the world’s lost or stolen art treaures, who presumably get a kick out of the power of keeping their possessions unseen. There’s something cabalistic about this, as if art might be reduced for being always looked at. Or like the cliche that there are aboriginals who believe that photographs steal away ones essence. And something does change. The Vermeers, say, that we know of, pale against that Vermeer lost for centuries, found at some future unspecified time in mankind’s history, hidden for centuries perhaps, passed down through generations of some family made purposive for owning such a masterpiece, and now finding it’s way again into a world quite different from the indifferent world from which it was kidnapped.

The release of the story of Ida has obviously been a brilliant piece of PR. And it is certainly a great story, but there do seem to be some huge question marks hanging over it. No wonder there is carping from the sidelines. Scientists can be as bitchy of each other as literary writers are.