Name: BBC The Link Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor (BBC The Link Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T06:26:18.000Z
Duration: 59 min
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

様態の副詞

a team of top scientists have been secretly studying a unique fossil.

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.

In the moment when the results of our investigations will be

published, this will be just like an asteroid hitting the earth.

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.

For almost 200 years, scientists have searched

The search has concentrated in East Africa,

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.

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.

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.

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".

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

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

This is the best fossil and rarest fossil worldwide.

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.

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.

Jorn's got to be certain it's a genuine fossil and not a forgery.

You can fake an outer surface of bone that looks really real,

but you cannot fake the inner structure of a bone.

So getting an X-ray, you can see the inside of the bone.

You can see actually the bone marrow inside.

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.

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BBC The Link Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor (BBC The Link Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor)

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