Dorking wildlife cameraman films ground-breaking documentary

By dblackmore

A cameraman was sworn to secrecy after taking part in the filming of a ground-breaking documentary.

Andrew Dearden, 52, from Dorking, has been shooting documentaries as a director of photography for the past 25 years, but his latest project has been his most exciting yet.

He has been working on The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor, a documentary broadcast by BBC One on Tuesday night.

The show covered the discovery of "Ida", a fossil discovered in Germany that is the most complete early primate skeleton ever found.

Some scientists believe that she could be one of mankind's earliest ancestors, providing a link between the first primates and modern humans, despite having died 47 million years ago.

But Mr Dearden was only able to tell people what he had been working on last week when the fossil was unveiled in New York.

He even had to keep his wife, Sue, 47, and daughters, Sophie, 18, and Emma, 17, in the dark about what he was doing.

He said: "There were only 30 people in the whole world who knew about it.

"I wasn't allowed to tell anyone what I was doing. My family knew I was making a documentary and that I couldn't say anything about it.

"But they are used to me going away and dangling off helicopters and things.

"When the information was made public last Tuesday I was allowed to tell people what I knew about it.

"It is the Mona Lisa of the fossil world." Some people have compared it to the Arc."

Mrs Dearden said: "He was away on and off for a few months and I was beginning to wonder what he was doing.

"I was really excited when I found out he had been working on something so revelatory."

Mr Dearden spent about two months filming the documentary, which took him to Norway, Germany, Uganda, Kenya and north America.

He said: "We filmed in chunks here and there.We would shoot a bit and come back."

Mr Dearden was given the opportunity to meet the cream of the anthropological world and he also travelled into the Ugandan rainforest and worked within a chimpanzee sanctuary.

He said: "Filming in the chimpanzee sanctuary in the rainforest was definitely one of the highlights.

"It was also quite a feat filming in the hot springs in Kenya.

"It is an amazing discovery and it is an amazing thing to be in the presence of."

For 150 years, scientists have debated the course of our evolutionary journey from tree-dwelling primate to modern Homo sapiens. They have long hoped that the earth may eventually yield a fossil that links apes, man and all other primates to the earliest mammals on the planet.

Ida is the most complete primate fossil ever found and has proto-anthropoid features, placing her at the base of the anthropoid branch which leads to monkeys, apes, and humans.