2025-07-21
58 分钟This is The Guardian.
On a late summer day in 2001, at the University of Poitiers in West Central France, the paleontologist 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 eons spent beneath what is now the Jurab 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 Macchirelli 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, Macchirelli told me.
He's a silverback gorilla.
Inspecting the skull, one could make out a mosaic of features, at once distinctly ape-like and distinctly human, a small brain case 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.
Machiavelli 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.