Caedes, your point is well taken and I have made a transcript of the conclusion of the program below but it does seem clear to me that the claims made to the scientific community are not quite as bold as those included in a TV program for the general public.
J ø rn Hurum ( associate professor in vertebrate palaeontology at the University of Oslo) : Its been a long journey describing this fossil. From the start where we all really believed strongly that she's a fantastic fossil but that she's related to lemurs until we now after finding one character after the other - finding that this doesn't fit, this doesn't fit, this is something else...and looking at it now it looks so much more exciting, even than a complete lemur. This is something much more important also for our own evolution.
David Attenborough : J ø rn and the team still need to find that one conclusive piece of evidence that will allow them to be sure that she is our relative. It's only after two years of work that they make a startling new discovery. There is a bone in Ida's foot that links her with every person on the planet. It could be the evidence that the first small adaptations towards walking upright happened 47 million years ago.
Jens Franzen ( world renowned authority on Messel Pit from the Senkenburg Institute, Frankfurt) : The ankle bone, the so-called talus in the Messel primate, shows exactly the evidence we see still in ourselves, in human beings of today, except that, of course, our bones are much bigger now, but they show the same kind of articulation.
David Attenborough : A tiny bone in her ankle, the talus, is shaped like that of a modern human. It is critical in connecting the leg to the foot and is key for bearing weight. This is crucial in making it possible to walk upright. Its shape is restricted to monkeys, apes and humans. The lemurs and the other prosimians have a bone of a completely different shape.
J ø rn Hurum ( associate professor in vertebrate palaeontology at the University of Oslo) : The shape of this bone tells something about the movement of the foot, and the movement of the foot of primates is quite different in different groups, and this particular shape of the talus bone is very, very much like a human's.
David Attenborough : This shaped foot bone makes Ida one of us, our 47-million-year old relative.
Jens Franzen ( world renowned authority on Messel Pit from the Senkenburg Institute, Frankfurt) : We are really dealing with a very, very early root of anthropoids at Messel.
David Attenborough : Ida comes from a crucial point in our evolution when the early primates split into the human and non-human groups. She is a fusion of both. She is a transitional species, a link that is now no longer missing.
J ø rn Hurum ( associate professor in vertebrate palaeontology at the University of Oslo) : It tells a part of our evolution that has been hidden so far. Its been hidden because all the other specimens are so incomplete, they're so broken, there's nothing almost to study...and now this wonderful fossil appears and it makes the story so much easier to tell, and so it's really a dream come true.
David Attenborough : We could all be descended from Ida. J ø rn and his team believe they have discovered our earliest complete primate ancestor. And remarkably, exactly 150 years after Darwin put forward the proposition that human beings were part of the rest of animal life, here, at last, we have a link that connects us not only with the apes and monkeys but also with the entire animal kingdom.
J ø rn Hurum (associate professor in vertebrate palaeontology at the University of Oslo) : This fossil turns out to be really important for us, as humans. This fossil is really a part of our history, truly a fossil that's a world heritage. This is the first link to human evolution, long before we started to divide into different ethnic groups. A find like this is something for all humankind.
