Our great, great, great Aunt is found....

It's funny, today I was supposed to be in Berlin, Germany with two of my closest friends. Instead I had to be at home with my crutches and my aching knee. Tomorrow is a Swedish national day, we call it a " red day" because we don't have to go to work and we still gets payed for it.

The name of this day, translated into English would be "Christ Flyer Day". As many of you know we are all atheist in Sweden. Maybe not all, but most of us... still we have a lot of days where we celebrate Christ, even though we like to believe in the big bang and the evolution, and how we are all sprung from animals and higher primates. Sure, that doesn't give us much to pray to when we have tough times. And we have no one to thank but ourselves and maybe people around us when something good happens.

So where am I going with this? Well, in 1980s- Germany a fossil- nicknamed Ida- was found and claimed to be a "missing link" between today's higher primates - monkeys, apes and humans. The preserved remains of a 47-million - year-old, lemur like creature have just been unveiled in the US.

The investigation of the fossil's significance was led by Jorn Hurum of the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway.

He said the fossil creature was "the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor" and described it as a dream come true. Ida bears a close resemblance to ourselves, with nails instead of claws , a grasping hand and an opposable thumb. Even though some aspects of the teeth indicate she is not a direct ancestor - more of an "aunt" than a "grandmother".

So there you have it. Your great, great, great, great, great (etc.) Aunt is a lemur-like fossil dated 47 million years back. This doesn't explain why we have a day of from work tomorrow in Sweden.

Or why it took 30 years for information to go from Germany to the US.

PEter