Excerpts from The First Human
The First HumanThe Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors
Written by Ann Gibbons
Science - Paleontology | Doubleday | Hardcover | April 2006 | $26.00 | 978-0-385-51226-8 (0-385-51226-0)
CHAPTER ONE: AFRICAN TRAILBLAZERS
I was told as a young student not to waste my time searching for Early Man in Africa, since "everyone knew he had started in Asia." — Louis Leakey, 1966
It was an October morning in 2003. Meave Leakey was driving from Nairobi north along the eastern wall of the Rift Valley in central Kenya, expertly weaving around potholes in the tarmac and dodging oncoming buses that played chicken with smaller vehicles to scare them out of their way. Trucks belched black smoke that stung her eyes, cyclists hitched rides up hills holding on to the backs of buses, and jam-packed public shuttles called matatus spent almost as much time passing each other as staying on their side of the two-lane road. As Meave negotiated this nerve-racking traffic on the Uplands Road between Nairobi and Nakuru, she calmly recounted the story of how the search for human ancestors began in eastern Africa. "Until the middle of 1959, only a few people seriously believed eastern Africa was a sensible place to look for the earliest human ancestors," she said.
This history is personal for her, because it is the saga of her husband's parents, Louis and Mary Leakey. This formidable pair was among the first to stake their careers on Africa as the birthplace of mankind. For three decades, their work in eastern Africa was an almost solitary pursuit. Even those researchers who found fossils of early ape-men in South Africa during that time had trouble convincing their European colleagues that these primitive fossils were ancestors of humans. Then, in 1959, Mary found a fossil in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, that would finally give the Leakeys the hard evidence they had long sought that early humans did indeed evolve in eastern Africa. Louis named the cranium, or partial skull, Zinjanthropus boisei--Zinj from an Arabic word for eastern Africa, anthropus from the Greek word for man, and boisei from Charles Boise, a London businessman who was their benefactor. Translated, the name is an assertion: "Man from Eastern Africa." And once the Man from Eastern Africa made his appearance, the push was on to find more extinct men and women. Soon, teams of French and American researchers headed to eastern Africa, like forty-niners to California during the gold rush. The fossils they found in the Great Rift Valley in the 1960s and 1970s soon made it known as the cradle of humanity.
But Louis's search for the missing link in eastern Africa had started more than thirty years earlier, right in the gullies and rock shelters alongside the Uplands Road where Meave was driving nearly eighty years later, high above the Great Rift Valley. In 1926, the first year that Louis worked in the area, the Uplands Road did not exist, and the trip from Nairobi in Louis's Model T Ford took a half day over muddy tracks. The air was so clear that Louis could see miles across the Great Rift Valley from his camp, down a slope covered with acacia trees and scrub brush to Lake Elmenteita, a shallow alkaline lake rimmed with the pink froth of flamingos. Bush babies, leopards, aardvarks, and ibises lived in the acacia woodlands near the shore, and a herd of hippos wallowed in the lake. Beyond the lake, the jagged calderas of several extinct volcanoes lined up to form the silhouette of a human figure that the local Masai tribesmen called Elngiragata Olmorani, for Sleeping Warrior. A few British settlers were staking out the Masai's traditional grazing grounds for homesteads for cattle ranches, but otherwise the area was still remote and primeval.
Today, Elmenteita is only an hour's drive beyond the shanty sprawl surrounding Nairobi, and much of the land around the lake is fenced in by private owners. The hippos are gone and the bush babies and a few remaining leopards have retreated to a wildlife sanctuary. But the view of the rift valley far below is still stunning, and Meave named the volcanoes visible in the distance as she searched for a familiar turnoff. Spotting it, she jostled down a dirt road, past a quarry where workers mined a crumbly white rock called diatomite, and pulled into a grassy driveway. The sign said: Kariandusi Museum, National Museums of Kenya. It did not look like much: a guard's hut and a whitewashed, single-room museum with some casts of skulls and an exhibit on the formation of the Great Rift Valley. It was clearly off the tourists' safari circuit.
A curator eventually appeared, delighted to find someone who wanted to tour the site on a Monday in October. He was even more surprised to find out that the tall woman with straight, silver-gray hair and hazel eyes spoke Swahili and was a member of the Leakey family--a name that is well-known in Kenya. At sixty-one, Meave had been here many times before and knew the history of Kariandusi by heart. She is long-legged and fit after a lifetime of hard work scrambling over rugged terrain for fossils, and she did not need a guide to lead her into the gulch. She let the curator show her the way to a series of steplike pits anyway, partly because she was curious to learn what he knew. He took her to the first pit, which was covered with a corrugated metal roof. Meave leaned over the rail and pointed to the dirt floor encrusted with hundreds of stone tools, most made of glassy black obsidian, the rock that comes from volcanic lava. There were tear-shaped hand axes, two-sided flakes, and even triplets of round stones that look like black billiard balls. "This is where it all began," said Meave. She was referring to Louis's search for early man in eastern Africa. These shiny black tools at Kariandusi were among the first hard evidence of a sophisticated ancient Stone Age culture in eastern Africa. They were made by people who left them on the shores of the lake almost 500,000 years ago, perhaps when they came to hunt wild animals that were quenching their thirst at dawn or dusk. She climbed down wooden stairs into a deep gully where an ibis was roosting in a tree. Meave remembered a photo from National Geographic that showed Louis bending over a cliff there, pointing to stone tools embedded in the wall. This was precisely the spot where Louis and his team found their first ancient hand axes in eastern Africa in 1929.
* * *
In 1871, less than sixty years earlier, Charles Darwin had proposed in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, that the earliest ancestors of humans probably lived on the African continent. But that prediction was based on absolutely no evidence from fossils. In fact, at the time only one fossil of another type of human being was known, and that was of a Neandertal that had lived in the Neander valley of Germany sometime in the past 70,000 years. Darwin chose Africa because humans' closest cousins in the animal kingdom--chimpanzees and gorillas--lived in Africa; therefore, he wrote, "it is more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere." But Darwin admitted that it was "useless to speculate on this subject," since an extinct European ape nearly as large as humans could also have given rise to humans.
That didn't stop Darwin's colleagues from conjecture. His friend and champion Thomas Henry Huxley (also known as Darwin's "bulldog") agreed that humans should be put in the same family as chimpanzees and gorillas, and enthusiastically promoted that view in debates and in his 1863 book Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature. (Darwin himself avoided dealing directly with the issue until 1871, when he published The Descent of Man.) But a contemporary and admirer of Darwin's, the prominent German biologist Ernst Haeckel, believed that the Asian apes (orangutans and gibbons) were closer relatives of humans than the African apes were. Haeckel proposed this link in his sketches of the human family tree in 1868, drawing a direct line between Asian apes and a new species of fossil human that he proposed and explicitly called the missing link. In his writings and lectures, Haeckel fleshed out this missing link as a hairy, primitive creature half ape, half man, named Pithecanthropus alalus. (Literally, "ape-man without speech," from the Greek pithec, "ape," anthropus, "man," and alalus, "without speech.") It walked semierect, had protruding teeth, and was speechless. But there wasn't a bit of hard evidence to support this vision of an ape-man. Haeckel's missing link was purely theoretical.
One person who heard of Haeckel's ideas on human evolution was a young Dutch medical student, Eugène Dubois, who became the first of a long line of young men obsessed with finding this missing link--and winning honor and fortune. In 1887, when Dubois couldn't get the Dutch government to finance an expedition to the tropics to search for fossils, he quit his job as an anatomist at the University of Amsterdam and joined the Royal Dutch East Indies Army as a military doctor so he could be posted to the Dutch East Indies, now the Indonesian archipelago. Ancient fossils of mammals that had been alive during the earliest stages of the Age of Man (the Pleistocene epoch) had been found there. He thought it most likely that fossils of extinct ancestors of similar age would be preserved there as well. According to his biographer, the anthropologist Pat Shipman, he also reasoned that if apes lived in the tropics today, extinct apes and early ape-men would also have been more likely to live in the tropics.
It was an incredible long shot, but he sailed for the Dutch East Indies at the age of twenty-nine with his young wife and their baby. Dubois was the first of many fossil hunters to risk his life in search of an elusive missing link. He battled malarial fever without modern medicines; his team hemorrhaged workers, who ran away, became ill, or stole fossils to sell as "dragon" bones to traders from China; and they faced bad roads through the overgrown jungles of Java, mosquitoes, hellish heat, and torrential rains. Amazingly, Dubois and his family survived. More incredibly, he found what he was looking for. In August 1891, his crew discovered the molar of a hominid eroding out of the banks of the Solo River near the village of Trinil on the island of Java. Two months later, his crew found a skullcap that was larger than that of a chimpanzee's but smaller than that of a human's. Later, they found a thighbone. Dubois recognized the skullcap as belonging to a species that must have had a brain intermediate in size and development between humans and apes. But the thighbone belonged to a creature that walked upright--even before its brain had expanded.
He pronounced it Pithecanthropus erectus (or "erect ape-man"). It was an amazing feat. He had never searched for fossils but had nonetheless traveled halfway around the world to an island archipelago where he'd reasoned that such fossils should be found. Today, Dubois's Java man is still recognized as a major discovery--the first fossil found of an early hominid and the first specimen of Homo erectus (as it was later renamed), a key human ancestor that arose about 1.8 million years ago, probably in Africa, before migrating to Asia, where it persisted until sometime in the past 250,000 years. This species of human and its descendants may even have lived until as recently as 13,000 years ago in the form of the so-called Hobbit, the dwarf species of human whose remains were found in 2004 on the Indonesian island of Flores.
Convincing his colleagues that he had found the missing link would prove more difficult than finding the fossils themselves. When Dubois announced his discovery of Java man in 1893, he expected honor and scientific recognition. Instead, his monograph on this "man-ape" was met with skepticism and snide comments, some dismissing the fossil as a giant gibbon or an individual whose features had been distorted by disease or a wound. Word reached him in Java in 1894 that his European colleagues questioned many aspects of his monograph on the fossil--from his claim that all the fossils came from the same individual to the way his crew had mapped the fossil site.
Dubois traveled to Europe in 1895 to defend his discovery, winning a few converts as he lectured and displayed the bones themselves. Haeckel, who had inspired him, was one who embraced Java man as a human ancestor. But the theory of evolution was still new and was not universally accepted among scholars. Although Dubois was well educated and a meticulous scientist, perhaps the real problem was that an ancestor that looked so much like an ape was more than the scientific establishment of the late nineteenth century could accept. His biographer Shipman concluded, "In truth, the problem lay more in the prevailing beliefs among his colleagues than in Dubois' shortcomings."
As he battled his colleagues well into the twentieth century, Dubois's own shortcomings also became apparent--he grew secretive and territorial about his fossils, particularly after he gave a cast to a German anatomist who then toured the world with it, giving lectures and publishing a detailed description about Java man before Dubois had finished his own analysis of the skull he had found. After that, he withdrew from his colleagues and even rigged a mirror above his door at home so he could see who was there when his maid answered, turning away prominent scientists who'd traveled from as far as America to see the fossils that he stored in his basement.
History would prove Dubois right about Java man, but he died an angry man, unrecognized and estranged from his wife and friends--all alienated by his increasing irascibility. He was, perhaps, the first fossil hunter to become a victim of his own success in finding a human ancestor, as if the fossil came with a mummy's curse.
It was a bitter omen of the kind of controversy that would swirl around almost every new fossil vying to be a human ancestor. Even experienced researchers often react with more emotion to the discovery of human ancestors than they do to fossils of any other animal, including dinosaurs. New fossils almost always shatter preconceived notions of what our ancestors should look like, revealing our origins as ordinary apes rather than as exalted beings marked from the beginning with a big brain or some other sign of special destiny. Darwin recognized this reflexive denial of our savage past in The Descent of Man when he warned, "We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system--with all these exalted powers--Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."
It was an October morning in 2003. Meave Leakey was driving from Nairobi north along the eastern wall of the Rift Valley in central Kenya, expertly weaving around potholes in the tarmac and dodging oncoming buses that played chicken with smaller vehicles to scare them out of their way. Trucks belched black smoke that stung her eyes, cyclists hitched rides up hills holding on to the backs of buses, and jam-packed public shuttles called matatus spent almost as much time passing each other as staying on their side of the two-lane road. As Meave negotiated this nerve-racking traffic on the Uplands Road between Nairobi and Nakuru, she calmly recounted the story of how the search for human ancestors began in eastern Africa. "Until the middle of 1959, only a few people seriously believed eastern Africa was a sensible place to look for the earliest human ancestors," she said.
This history is personal for her, because it is the saga of her husband's parents, Louis and Mary Leakey. This formidable pair was among the first to stake their careers on Africa as the birthplace of mankind. For three decades, their work in eastern Africa was an almost solitary pursuit. Even those researchers who found fossils of early ape-men in South Africa during that time had trouble convincing their European colleagues that these primitive fossils were ancestors of humans. Then, in 1959, Mary found a fossil in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, that would finally give the Leakeys the hard evidence they had long sought that early humans did indeed evolve in eastern Africa. Louis named the cranium, or partial skull, Zinjanthropus boisei--Zinj from an Arabic word for eastern Africa, anthropus from the Greek word for man, and boisei from Charles Boise, a London businessman who was their benefactor. Translated, the name is an assertion: "Man from Eastern Africa." And once the Man from Eastern Africa made his appearance, the push was on to find more extinct men and women. Soon, teams of French and American researchers headed to eastern Africa, like forty-niners to California during the gold rush. The fossils they found in the Great Rift Valley in the 1960s and 1970s soon made it known as the cradle of humanity.
But Louis's search for the missing link in eastern Africa had started more than thirty years earlier, right in the gullies and rock shelters alongside the Uplands Road where Meave was driving nearly eighty years later, high above the Great Rift Valley. In 1926, the first year that Louis worked in the area, the Uplands Road did not exist, and the trip from Nairobi in Louis's Model T Ford took a half day over muddy tracks. The air was so clear that Louis could see miles across the Great Rift Valley from his camp, down a slope covered with acacia trees and scrub brush to Lake Elmenteita, a shallow alkaline lake rimmed with the pink froth of flamingos. Bush babies, leopards, aardvarks, and ibises lived in the acacia woodlands near the shore, and a herd of hippos wallowed in the lake. Beyond the lake, the jagged calderas of several extinct volcanoes lined up to form the silhouette of a human figure that the local Masai tribesmen called Elngiragata Olmorani, for Sleeping Warrior. A few British settlers were staking out the Masai's traditional grazing grounds for homesteads for cattle ranches, but otherwise the area was still remote and primeval.
Today, Elmenteita is only an hour's drive beyond the shanty sprawl surrounding Nairobi, and much of the land around the lake is fenced in by private owners. The hippos are gone and the bush babies and a few remaining leopards have retreated to a wildlife sanctuary. But the view of the rift valley far below is still stunning, and Meave named the volcanoes visible in the distance as she searched for a familiar turnoff. Spotting it, she jostled down a dirt road, past a quarry where workers mined a crumbly white rock called diatomite, and pulled into a grassy driveway. The sign said: Kariandusi Museum, National Museums of Kenya. It did not look like much: a guard's hut and a whitewashed, single-room museum with some casts of skulls and an exhibit on the formation of the Great Rift Valley. It was clearly off the tourists' safari circuit.
A curator eventually appeared, delighted to find someone who wanted to tour the site on a Monday in October. He was even more surprised to find out that the tall woman with straight, silver-gray hair and hazel eyes spoke Swahili and was a member of the Leakey family--a name that is well-known in Kenya. At sixty-one, Meave had been here many times before and knew the history of Kariandusi by heart. She is long-legged and fit after a lifetime of hard work scrambling over rugged terrain for fossils, and she did not need a guide to lead her into the gulch. She let the curator show her the way to a series of steplike pits anyway, partly because she was curious to learn what he knew. He took her to the first pit, which was covered with a corrugated metal roof. Meave leaned over the rail and pointed to the dirt floor encrusted with hundreds of stone tools, most made of glassy black obsidian, the rock that comes from volcanic lava. There were tear-shaped hand axes, two-sided flakes, and even triplets of round stones that look like black billiard balls. "This is where it all began," said Meave. She was referring to Louis's search for early man in eastern Africa. These shiny black tools at Kariandusi were among the first hard evidence of a sophisticated ancient Stone Age culture in eastern Africa. They were made by people who left them on the shores of the lake almost 500,000 years ago, perhaps when they came to hunt wild animals that were quenching their thirst at dawn or dusk. She climbed down wooden stairs into a deep gully where an ibis was roosting in a tree. Meave remembered a photo from National Geographic that showed Louis bending over a cliff there, pointing to stone tools embedded in the wall. This was precisely the spot where Louis and his team found their first ancient hand axes in eastern Africa in 1929.
* * *
In 1871, less than sixty years earlier, Charles Darwin had proposed in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, that the earliest ancestors of humans probably lived on the African continent. But that prediction was based on absolutely no evidence from fossils. In fact, at the time only one fossil of another type of human being was known, and that was of a Neandertal that had lived in the Neander valley of Germany sometime in the past 70,000 years. Darwin chose Africa because humans' closest cousins in the animal kingdom--chimpanzees and gorillas--lived in Africa; therefore, he wrote, "it is more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere." But Darwin admitted that it was "useless to speculate on this subject," since an extinct European ape nearly as large as humans could also have given rise to humans.
That didn't stop Darwin's colleagues from conjecture. His friend and champion Thomas Henry Huxley (also known as Darwin's "bulldog") agreed that humans should be put in the same family as chimpanzees and gorillas, and enthusiastically promoted that view in debates and in his 1863 book Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature. (Darwin himself avoided dealing directly with the issue until 1871, when he published The Descent of Man.) But a contemporary and admirer of Darwin's, the prominent German biologist Ernst Haeckel, believed that the Asian apes (orangutans and gibbons) were closer relatives of humans than the African apes were. Haeckel proposed this link in his sketches of the human family tree in 1868, drawing a direct line between Asian apes and a new species of fossil human that he proposed and explicitly called the missing link. In his writings and lectures, Haeckel fleshed out this missing link as a hairy, primitive creature half ape, half man, named Pithecanthropus alalus. (Literally, "ape-man without speech," from the Greek pithec, "ape," anthropus, "man," and alalus, "without speech.") It walked semierect, had protruding teeth, and was speechless. But there wasn't a bit of hard evidence to support this vision of an ape-man. Haeckel's missing link was purely theoretical.
One person who heard of Haeckel's ideas on human evolution was a young Dutch medical student, Eugène Dubois, who became the first of a long line of young men obsessed with finding this missing link--and winning honor and fortune. In 1887, when Dubois couldn't get the Dutch government to finance an expedition to the tropics to search for fossils, he quit his job as an anatomist at the University of Amsterdam and joined the Royal Dutch East Indies Army as a military doctor so he could be posted to the Dutch East Indies, now the Indonesian archipelago. Ancient fossils of mammals that had been alive during the earliest stages of the Age of Man (the Pleistocene epoch) had been found there. He thought it most likely that fossils of extinct ancestors of similar age would be preserved there as well. According to his biographer, the anthropologist Pat Shipman, he also reasoned that if apes lived in the tropics today, extinct apes and early ape-men would also have been more likely to live in the tropics.
It was an incredible long shot, but he sailed for the Dutch East Indies at the age of twenty-nine with his young wife and their baby. Dubois was the first of many fossil hunters to risk his life in search of an elusive missing link. He battled malarial fever without modern medicines; his team hemorrhaged workers, who ran away, became ill, or stole fossils to sell as "dragon" bones to traders from China; and they faced bad roads through the overgrown jungles of Java, mosquitoes, hellish heat, and torrential rains. Amazingly, Dubois and his family survived. More incredibly, he found what he was looking for. In August 1891, his crew discovered the molar of a hominid eroding out of the banks of the Solo River near the village of Trinil on the island of Java. Two months later, his crew found a skullcap that was larger than that of a chimpanzee's but smaller than that of a human's. Later, they found a thighbone. Dubois recognized the skullcap as belonging to a species that must have had a brain intermediate in size and development between humans and apes. But the thighbone belonged to a creature that walked upright--even before its brain had expanded.
He pronounced it Pithecanthropus erectus (or "erect ape-man"). It was an amazing feat. He had never searched for fossils but had nonetheless traveled halfway around the world to an island archipelago where he'd reasoned that such fossils should be found. Today, Dubois's Java man is still recognized as a major discovery--the first fossil found of an early hominid and the first specimen of Homo erectus (as it was later renamed), a key human ancestor that arose about 1.8 million years ago, probably in Africa, before migrating to Asia, where it persisted until sometime in the past 250,000 years. This species of human and its descendants may even have lived until as recently as 13,000 years ago in the form of the so-called Hobbit, the dwarf species of human whose remains were found in 2004 on the Indonesian island of Flores.
Convincing his colleagues that he had found the missing link would prove more difficult than finding the fossils themselves. When Dubois announced his discovery of Java man in 1893, he expected honor and scientific recognition. Instead, his monograph on this "man-ape" was met with skepticism and snide comments, some dismissing the fossil as a giant gibbon or an individual whose features had been distorted by disease or a wound. Word reached him in Java in 1894 that his European colleagues questioned many aspects of his monograph on the fossil--from his claim that all the fossils came from the same individual to the way his crew had mapped the fossil site.
Dubois traveled to Europe in 1895 to defend his discovery, winning a few converts as he lectured and displayed the bones themselves. Haeckel, who had inspired him, was one who embraced Java man as a human ancestor. But the theory of evolution was still new and was not universally accepted among scholars. Although Dubois was well educated and a meticulous scientist, perhaps the real problem was that an ancestor that looked so much like an ape was more than the scientific establishment of the late nineteenth century could accept. His biographer Shipman concluded, "In truth, the problem lay more in the prevailing beliefs among his colleagues than in Dubois' shortcomings."
As he battled his colleagues well into the twentieth century, Dubois's own shortcomings also became apparent--he grew secretive and territorial about his fossils, particularly after he gave a cast to a German anatomist who then toured the world with it, giving lectures and publishing a detailed description about Java man before Dubois had finished his own analysis of the skull he had found. After that, he withdrew from his colleagues and even rigged a mirror above his door at home so he could see who was there when his maid answered, turning away prominent scientists who'd traveled from as far as America to see the fossils that he stored in his basement.
History would prove Dubois right about Java man, but he died an angry man, unrecognized and estranged from his wife and friends--all alienated by his increasing irascibility. He was, perhaps, the first fossil hunter to become a victim of his own success in finding a human ancestor, as if the fossil came with a mummy's curse.
It was a bitter omen of the kind of controversy that would swirl around almost every new fossil vying to be a human ancestor. Even experienced researchers often react with more emotion to the discovery of human ancestors than they do to fossils of any other animal, including dinosaurs. New fossils almost always shatter preconceived notions of what our ancestors should look like, revealing our origins as ordinary apes rather than as exalted beings marked from the beginning with a big brain or some other sign of special destiny. Darwin recognized this reflexive denial of our savage past in The Descent of Man when he warned, "We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system--with all these exalted powers--Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."
Excerpted from The First Human by Ann Gibbons. Copyright © 2006 by Ann Gibbons. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Additional excerpts:
Excerpt from the Introduction (pdf)
Excerpt from Chapter Nine, A View From Afar (pdf)
Excerpt from Chapter Sixteen, Bones of Contention (pdf)
...and I am Sid Harth
Excerpt from the Introduction (pdf)
Excerpt from Chapter Nine, A View From Afar (pdf)
Excerpt from Chapter Sixteen, Bones of Contention (pdf)
Excerpts from
The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors
Written by Ann Gibbons
Science-Paleontology | Doubleday | Hardcover | April 2006 | $26.00
EXCERPT FROM
CHAPTER SIXTEEN, BONES OF CONTENTION
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.--Virginia Woolf
The French Academy of Sciences has been the scene of many passionate, even
dangerous, debates since its formation in a Jesuit monk’s cell in 1666. The founding
members met to discuss the radical ideas of Galileo and Descartes. A century later, in
1793, during the Reign of Terror, the elitist academy was deemed undemocratic and
abolished; the renowned chemist Antoine Lavoisier was beheaded for his prominent role.
But the academy reconvened two years later and moved into its present home in the
magnificent baroque palace of the Institute of France on the Left Bank of the Seine River.
The academicians were still perceived as a political threat, with Napoleon complaining
about the “salon politics of liberal intellectuals.” He appointed himself president of the
institute in 1801, the better to reform the academies to his liking. The Academy of
Sciences survived, and by the late nineteenth century, the fraternity of male scholars
would move to protect itself from a new type of threat: it would vote to reject Marie
Curie for membership in 1911, only months before she won her second Nobel Prize.
Even the shroud of Turin was brought here—with scientists arguing intensely for two
days over whether it was legitimate and worthy of study.
It was thus a perfect setting for staging a passionate debate among three scientists whose
fossils were the trio of leading contenders for the status of the oldest known hominid. On
a gray and drizzly Monday in September 2004,Michel Brunet, Brigitte Senut, and Tim
White met for a rare face-to-face debate, along with French paleoanthropologist Yves
Coppens, a member of the academy. Word of this unprecedented lineup had spread
widely, and paleontologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists from all over Europe
jammed into the opulent Grande Salle des Séances, where the speakers were poised to
channel humanity’s most ancient ancestors.
Translators took their places in a soundproof glass booth and headsets were passed out to
members of the academy, so they could listen to the panel discuss the topic of “The First
Hominids” in English or French. Television crews stood by, and the heat of their lights
made the dark, wood-paneled room even more sweltering, with the windows closed and
the draperies drawn for PowerPoint presentations. As Brunet, Senut, and White took their
places in turn on the raised dais to speak, the camera lights illuminated the portraits and
marble busts of the author Voltaire, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the
mathematician Pierre de Fermat, and the physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb.
Perhaps even more telling, one gilt frame was empty, a reminder to the French scientists
that one among them might eventually have his or her visage framed there as well. The first
one to speak was Michel Brunet. Dressed in a navy jacket, striped shirt, and tie,with his
straight gray hair brushed back, he was ready for serious business. He quickly
dispensed with niceties to get right to the “bone of the matter,” in his words. He held up a
fossil jaw and said, “Last month, this jaw became part of history.” The bone in his hand
was a partial lower jaw of Toumaï’s species,Sahelanthropus tchadensis.
It had been the subject of an article in a recent issue of then South African
Journal of Science.
In that article, the French geographer Alain Beauvilain, who had been part of the team that found
the jaw, charged that Brunet’s team had glued an isolated molar—a wisdom tooth—onthe wrong side of a lower jaw. Beauvilain and a French orthodontist who was his coauthor, Yves Le Guellec, said the isolated molar was glued on the right side instead of
the left side of the jaw, where they thought it belonged. It was a curious report; neither
one was a paleontologist or an anatomist familiar with fossil teeth, and their criticism did
not alter the fossils’ status as a new type of human ancestor in any way. But it cast a cloud over Brunet’s methods, suggesting that his team was sloppy with their fossilanalysis and inventory methods. The spectacle of scientists
fightingtooth and nail over awisdom tooth was widely reported in the French media.
Brunet brought up the report at the beginning of his talk at the academy, complaining that
he had firstlearned of the article when he was visiting White in Berkeley, after it was
published. The journal had not given him a chance to respond before publication, so he
would do so at the meeting. He held up the jaw and explained that the wisdom tooth was
found ten centimeters beside it, it was cleaned, and it was glued in where he said there
was an “unambiguous match” between the molar and roots on the right side of the
jawbone, which was evident on CT scans of the jaw. After he took a hard look at Senut,
he said that a certain paleontologist who had not seen the jawbone had been quoted in the
French press as saying he thought the tooth was glued on the wrong side.
“I have to admit, I wonder what his intentions are,” Brunet said. Then he mentioned that this still
unnamed paleontologist—assumed to be Senut’s partner, Martin Pickford—was one of
the codiscoverers of Orrorin.Pickford, in fact, had translated Beauvilain’s article into
English for the journal. Brunet’s intent was clear: he believed that Pickford was waging a
campaign against Sahelanthropus as an hominid and against Brunet’s ability to analyze the
fossils, because it threatened Orrorin’s status as the earliest member of the human family
(a charge that Pickford said is “absurd”). Brunet then went over the traits that made
Toumaï a hominid and said, “Until proven otherwise,Sahelanthropus tchadensisis the
oldest known hominid.”
Pickford, who was traveling and could not attend the meeting, would say later that the
editor of the journal had asked him to translate the article, not Beauvilain. He at
first wrote a letter of apology to Brunet that he sent to the South African journal, but he
rescinded it after Beauvilain and Le Guellec refused the apology. Then, twenty-seven
researchers signed a letter in support of Brunet, saying that the molar had been put in the
right spot. Pilbeam, who was a coauthor with Brunet on the report on Toumaï, said he
was stunned that the journal would print Beauvilain’s article because “any competent
morphologist seeing the originals or casts, along with the CT scans, would immediately
recognize that the molar is from the right side.” But Pickford and Beauvilain criticized
the letter as a tactic to intimidate and tifledebate on published fossils, and Beauvilain
wrote a new letter to the journal with more criticism of Brunet’s methods.
http://www.anngibbons.com/FirstHuman/Excerpt-Ch16.pdf
