Q: Is it possible to find the Missing Links ever in human’s evolution? In other words, is it possible for us to find our ancestors ever? E.g. what’s Missing Links? What’s the relation between human being and chimpanzees? How to locate human being in evolution history and how to find our ancient families and ancestors? If we cannot find the missing links ever, does it mean it’s a waste of time for us to keep finding them? What do the fossil records work in finding the missing links?

A: A major implication of Darwin and Wallace’s theory of natural selection is that all life forms, living and extinct, are descended from a single common ancestor. In other words, all living things are related to each other. Looking at the very different forms of life living today, this idea is sometimes difficult to accept, and raises an important question: where are the transitional forms that bridge seemingly insurmountable gaps between different groups of living things – the missing links in the Tree of Life?

Well, for a start, we can safely say that we won’t find missing links alive today. This is worth thinking about for a moment. Chimpanzees and bonobos are our nearest living relatives, but we did not descend from them. Rather, we share a common ancestor that lived a few million years ago. Since then, our evolutionary paths have been separate. We have as little right to claim that we evolved from chimpanzees as chimpanzees have to claim that they evolved from us!

So it is to the fossil record that we must look to find the missing links. But will we ever find them – our direct ancestors? This is often claimed to be the case when certain new fossils come to light, especially if they have anything to do with the origin of humans, such as the fossil primate ‘Ida’ that has been in the news recently. This is, in my opinion, outrageously optimistic. The number of living species is very large (somewhere between 2 million and 100 million, most of which haven’t been described), but this is a mere fraction of the total number of species that have ever lived. The vast majority of these had their evolutionary lineages cut short: only a few are the direct ancestors of species living today. Now consider the improbability of a member of a species being fossilised and the further improbability of various geological processes bringing that fossil back to Earth’s surface today, and the further improbability that a palaeontologist stumbles upon it. The odds against any one of our direct ancestors ever being found are astronomical.

So, if the missing links will always remain missing, should we give up looking? Absolutely not! Every fossil we find can be slotted into the Tree of Life, and can tell us a little more about how life evolved. Even if ‘Ida’ turns out not to be our direct ancestor (and I’ll bet any money that it isn’t!), it still shares a common ancestor with us, and can therefore tell us about that ancestor by what we (rather, our group – the apes and monkeys) have in common with her. So, in a way, we have found our ancestor, but we can’t see it or hold it, we can only reconstruct it. The more fossils we find, the more ancestors we will be able to reconstruct, each telling us a little more about the evolutionary changes that took place on the lineage leading to humans, or any other species for that matter.