When fossilised remains were discovered in the Djurab desert in 2001, they were hailed as radically rewriting the history of our species. But not everyone was convinced – and the bitter argument that followed has consumed the lives of scholars ever since
By Scott Sayare
On a late-summer day in 2001, at the University of Poitiers in west-central France, the palaeontologist Michel Brunet summoned his colleagues into a classroom to examine an unusual skull. Brunet had just returned from Chad, and brought with him an extremely ancient cranium. It had been distorted by the aeons spent beneath what is now the Djurab desert; a crust of black mineral deposits left it looking charred and slightly malevolent. It sat on a table. “What is this thing?” Brunet wondered aloud. He was behaving a bit theatrically, the professor Roberto Macchiarelli recalled not long ago. Brunet was a devoted teacher and scientist, then 61, but his competitive impulses were also known to be immoderate, and he seemed to take a ruthless pleasure in the jealousy of his peers. “Michel is a dominant male,” Macchiarelli told me. “He’s a silverback gorilla.”
Inspecting the skull, one could make out a mosaic of features at once distinctly apelike and distinctly human: a small braincase and prominent brow ridge, but also what seemed to be a rather unprotruding jaw, smallish canines and a foramen magnum – the hole at the base of the skull through which the spinal cord connects to the brain – that suggested the possibility of an upright bearing, a two-legged gait. Macchiarelli told Brunet he did not know what to make of it. “Right answer!” Brunet said.
The discovery was announced to the world the following year on the cover of Nature, the leading scientific journal, and in a televised ceremony in the Chadian capital, N’Djamena. “A new hominid is born,” Brunet declared. “By virtue of his age, he is the ancestor of all Chadians. But also the ancestor of the whole of humankind!”
The skull, which Brunet called “Toumaï” – a name from the Djurab, meaning “hope of life” – belonged to a two-legged animal of the Upper Miocene epoch, between 6 and 7m years old. Assuming it was indeed our distant forebear, it was the most ancient ever found, by a margin of as much as 1m years. The location of its discovery furthermore suggested that the human lineage might not have evolved in the savannas of the Great Rift valley of east Africa, as long understood, but rather about 1,500 miles west, in what were once the gallery forests of the greater Sahara. Toumaï stood to upend our very notions of how and why we came to be, to “fundamentally change the way we reconstruct the tree of life”, one prominent palaeontologist wrote. Brunet, to whom the honour of naming the new species fell, called it Sahelanthropus tchadensis: “Sahel Man of Chad.”….
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After the truth-shower 