MANJUNATH KIRAN/AFP/GETTY ALAIN BEAUVILAIN W published paper. scientific but has yet thoroughly to in a be described ago by scientists French inthe city of Poitiers, old femur agenda.the The approximately 7-million-year- study of human evolution not will feature on BY EWENCALLAWAY Fresh take on human ancestry struggles to beaccepted. remain a secret Femur findings A fossilizedskeleton was discovered inChad2001.Researchers haveraised questionsaboutitsfemur(longbone,centre right). PALEOANTHROPOLOGY ONLINE MORE 1 was examined more than adecade most provocative fossils inthe at end the of January, one of the hen anthropologists inFrance meet
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M com/2n3emnb sink competition Moon-mission chances for start-up’s Indian a c pologist at University the of Poitiers, and Aude by Macchiarelli, Roberto posal apalaeoanthro Paris and takes place in Poitiers. But prothe organized by Anthropological of the Society present their analysis at meeting, the which is descriptionliminary of it. had They hoped to bone in2004havethe briefly prepared apre access to it, but two scientists analysed who relatives. extinct their Few people have had hominin, group the that includes humans and m i go.nature. l l The fossil may belong to earliest the known a n
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A l l r 25 JANUARY25 VOL 2018 | NATURE 553| |391 i g - - - h t s r e Djurab Desert innorthern Chad,Djurab says Desert Alain battered skull and other bones at a site in the early on morning the of 19July a 2001,beside accusation about would this not founded.” be which is sovereign in its decision. Hence, any pendent and committee, scientific impartial It work said: “This is conducted by an inde Nature about specimen.” this tell people what we have, and what we know skull discoverers have claimed after analysing the is earliest the species hominin yet found, as its important it because the could whether settle tchadensis Sahelanthropus The femur probably belongs to called aspecies unpublished report with critical,” says Macchiarelli, has who shared his was by rejected conference the organizers. History Victor-Brun in Montauban, France, Bergeret, director of Museum the of Natural s e r The The of ParisThe Anthropological told Society is specimen really important.“This It’s v e d 2 . . “This is afantastic. “This occasion to finally Sahelanthropus Sahelanthropus that it had 6out rejected of 65abstracts. NATURE PODCAST femur was discovered podcast nature.com/nature/ maze forrats light; andanew painting with robot; 3D A miniall-terrain IN FOCUS Nature , he says. The bone is ’s team. news
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Beauvilain, a retired geographer who led fragments from the trip. In 2004, Bergeret, who is a hominin, but thinks a conclusion should the field team that made the discovery. was then a graduate student at the University of be made only after more careful study of all its Michel Brunet, a palaeontologist at the Uni- Poitiers, came across the blackened and badly remains, including the femur. versity of Poitiers, who headed the Chadian damaged bone while analysing other bones The femur and other Sahelanthropus remains expedition that discovered the Sahelanthropus in the collection. “I discovered the femur by are crucial to determining the status of the spe- remains, argues that the species is the earliest chance,” she says. cies, because individual anatomical parts can known representative of the hominin lineage. often be misleading about evolutionary history, His team described the skull — dubbed EXCITING FIND says Bernard Wood, a palaeoanthropologist at Toumaï, which means ‘hope of life’ in the Brunet and other members of his team were George Washington University in Washington Chadian Daza language — in a 2002 Nature back in Chad when Bergeret found the femur. DC. He says the fossil could belong to a now- paper2 that became a scientific blockbuster. So she asked Macchiarelli, who studies human extinct lineage of great ape. A subsequent analysis of the skull and other evolution and who was then head of the A paper describing the femur is “long over- fragments by Brunet and his team suggests that department of geosciences at the University due”, says palaeoanthropologist Bill Jungers, Toumaï probably walked upright on two legs3. of Poitiers, for help in at Stony Brook University in New York. “We Brunet declined to comment on the analysis of “This is a analysing it. She says don’t know why it’s been kept secret. Maybe it’s the thigh bone or on Macchiarelli’s and Berger- fantastic that she examined not even a hominin. Who the hell knows until et’s efforts to describe it at the Poitiers meeting. occasion to it closely for several someone can expose it.” ■ “Our studies are still in progress,” he wrote in days, comparing it finally 1. Lebatard, A.-E. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 105, an e-mail. “Nothing to say before publishing.” tell people what to other hominin 3226–3231 (2008). Other researchers have questioned whether we have, and fossils. “I remember 2. Brunet, M. et al. Nature 418, 145–151 (2002). Toumaï was indeed part of the lineage that led to joking with another 3. Zollikofer, C. P. E. et al. Nature 434, 755–759 what we know.” (2005). humans, pointing to recently discovered fossils student, who told me, 4. Brunet, M. Nature 419, 582 (2002). from Ethiopia and Kenya as better contenders ‘You found Toumaï’s femur!’,” Bergeret says. “I for the earliest hominin. But Brunet’s team has realized when I saw Roberto Macchiarelli that stood by Toumaï’s hominin status in response this joke was probably based on reality.” CORRECTION to the controversy4 and in a subsequent publica- In their short description of the femur, Mac- The Editorial ‘Vaccine boosters’ (Nature tion that described a lower jaw and teeth3. chiarelli and Bergeret contend that the bone 553, 259–250; 2018) said that the HIV- Beauvilain says that the femur and other differs greatly from that of a roughly 6-million- infected blood transfusions were given in material remained in Chad until they were year old potential hominin found in Kenya in the early 1990s. In fact, they were given in eventually shipped to Poitiers in 2003, where 2000 that is thought to have walked on two the 1980s. they were stored in a collection of animal-bone feet. Macchiarelli doubts that Sahelanthropus
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