Educated 21st Century people tend to assume that race isn’t scientific because they hold a view of science derived mostly from physics. Science, in the conventional wisdom, must provide answers that are clear-cut, certain, authoritative, inarguable, with no room for differing opinions. If categories are less than utterly hard-edged, then they can’t be Scientific.
Of course, even physics isn’t really like that.
And all the sciences related to biology or the human world (e.g., linguistics) are thoroughly beset with inevitable lumper-splitter controversies about how best to carve nature at the joints.
A good example of this messiness is paleontology, the study of old bones and fossils, especially its glamor subfield, the study of ancient human remains.
Despite its use of calipers, those instruments of the devil, paleoanthropology is not a controversial field in the public’s mind. Building speculative family trees of ancient kin of modern humans based on a handful of old bones is not fatally tainted by racism in the view of the conventional wisdom.
Instead, it’s The Science!
But behind the scenes in human paleontology … well … there’s little but controversy, as vividly described in a wonderful new long form article in The Guardian by Scott Sayare. His tale could be, in plot if not prose style, a Nabokov satire on egomaniacal college professors. (It’s far above the usual quality of Guardian articles.)
A century and a half ago, the scientific dispute that has been festering since 2001 over whether a six or seven million year old skull found in Chad is the oldest known hominin (kin of modern humans) or merely a more distant hominid (kin of today’s great apes, which include us) might well have led to one or more duels being fought.
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
Tue 27 May 2025 00.00 EDT
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.
Brunet
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.”
Macchiarelli (Dustin Hoffman, call your agent)
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. …
Brunet, to whom the honour of naming the new species fell, called it Sahelanthropus tchadensis: “Sahel Man of Chad.”
Paleontology sometimes has disputes about whether a new fossil represents a new, as of yet unknown species (or, even better, a new genus), or is just another example of an already known species. It’s more professionally glamorous to be acknowledged as discovering a new species (much less a genus), so paleontologists tend to be splitters when it come to their own finds.
Paywall here.
After all, the definition of species is still unclear. Interfertility seems like the best benchmark, but dogs, coyotes, and wolves are interfertile, yet the Endangered Species Act mandates a lot of effort on preserving wolves and even wolf-coyote hybrids like the red wolf as representing real species. (By the way, that doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.)
And how in the world can we tell if a fossil from, say, 2 million years ago came from a creature who would have been interfertile with the original owner of a fossil from 3 million years ago?
But Toumaï wasn’t controversial over whether or not it was different enough from known species to be a new species or genus. It was definitely well out there. The question became whether or not the fossil is from a species more or less ancestral to humans (cool) or merely to some other big ape (less cool).
But immediately questions were raised about whether the species was correctly assigned to the human lineage. The authors of a sneering letter in Nature suggested renaming it “Sahelpithecus” (“Sahel Ape”), most notably because it did not, according to their counter-analysis of the skull, walk on two feet – bipedalism being one of the very few available criteria for identifying ancient members of our evolutionary branch. Yet it escaped the notice of no one in the field that some of the letter-writers were affiliated with another hominid species, which had, until the arrival of Sahelanthropus, held the record for the oldest known. And while the question of Sahelanthropus’s gait was acknowledged to be a crucial one, the skull alone was not going to provide a definitive answer. For that, “postcrania” would be required: remains from the neck down, especially the lower body – a pelvis, a femur. Unfortunately, Brunet reported in Nature, none had been recovered.
Or … had another fossilized bone also been found?
Brunet became a celebrity scientist. …
Fame made Brunet grandiose and, in the opinion of some colleagues, slightly paranoid. He seemed to assume that everyone everywhere was consumed with the idea of studying Toumaï, “as if it were the most precious thing on Earth”, said Olga Otero, a researcher who worked with him for years. Brunet’s relations with Macchiarelli, in particular, deteriorated. He had recruited Macchiarelli, who was 15 years his junior, from Rome, and he seemed to expect a certain deference. The palaeontology group in Poitiers was organised to an unusual degree around Brunet, its director; he had a tendency to treat the other scientists as if they were his vassals, as mere “service providers”, Otero said, expecting them to conduct research that furthered his own work, and refusing to sign off on projects that did not. Many members, especially the graduate students, put up with it in exchange for the resources and visibility he afforded them, I was told. But Macchiarelli had no interest in pledging loyalty. “Doubts, additional questions, argument and criticism contribute to the strength, not the weakness, of scientific thought,” he told Nature in 2003. Brunet referred to him derisively as “the Italian”, Macchiarelli told me. …
“This piece,” he warned, holding the other [Toumaï fossil, a femur] before her: “You forget you ever saw it.”
Palaeoanthropology is a notoriously disputatious, not to say vicious, field. In part, this is an effect of self-selection: given its prestige, and its philosophical, even metaphysical implications, the study of human prehistory attracts the most ambitious and, as one member of the discipline put it to me, “the most psychotic”, palaeontologists. There is, additionally, a cultural divide within the field between, speaking very broadly, field workers and laboratory specialists. The former disdain the latter as “armchair palaeontologists”; the latter disdain the former as “fossil hunters”.
But most of the fighting in palaeoanthropology is simply a function of the wild imbalance between the number of palaeoanthropologists, which is large, and the number of objects available for them to study, which is very much not. Our direct knowledge of the first few million years of human evolution derives from a collection of bone fragments that could no more than halfway fill a large shoebox. “It’s a bit frustrating,” the researcher Jean-Jacques Jaeger told me, with some understatement, “but there really is a gap in the palaeontological record between, I’d say, 14m and 5m years ago in Africa.” Among other things, the tectonics of this period were not conducive to fossil formation. Unfortunately, this period is precisely when the human line began.
Still, the greatest conflicts in the field tend not to be over access to fossils but over the sense one makes of them. Attempting to reconstruct the history of early humanity from the available evidence is, it has been said, akin to trying to divine the plot of War and Peace from just 13 of its pages, picked at random. Major disagreements of interpretation are inevitable, as are major errors, and the discovery of a single new “page” can change everything we thought we understood about the broader story. What we call our knowledge of the deep human past is in fact overwhelmingly provisional, contingent upon whatever fossil happens to turn up next. …
If logic were the only factor, the flimsiness of our understanding would inspire restraint, and new fossil discoveries would only rarely give rise to grand pronouncements about the nature of humanity. But the impulse to make such pronouncements, heightened by the prospect of fame, not to mention grant money, can be overwhelming. There is a large and receptive audience for stories about the origins of humankind, however conjectural the stories may actually be. We yearn to know how and why we came to be ourselves, how humanity emerged out of nature. Frequently we yearn, as any historian of the prehistoric sciences will tell you, to the point of unreason.
The result is a corpus of palaeoanthropological knowledge that is forever being not only revised but effectively rewritten, and then rewritten again. “A so-called science in which every new piece of evidence is claimed to overthrow all previous ideas must either be in a very juvenile state of development,” the palaeontologist Martin Pickford once wrote, “or it can’t really be a science at all, just a string of temporary opinions.” Pickford, a co-discoverer of the 6m-year-old species Orrorin tugenensis, knew whereof he spoke. A few years after he wrote that line, Orrorin was displaced by Brunet’s Sahelanthropus as the oldest hominid, and Pickford was penning his “Sahelpithecus” letter in Nature.
Even bipedality itself, which seemed so crucial after Lucy, is no longer taken as an obvious criterion for human-ness, at least not for the most ancient candidates. Our line evidently began walking upright at some point well before Lucy’s species emerged, but there is no agreement as to exactly when this habitual bipedalism began. It is entirely possible that our oldest ancestors walked not on two feet but four; it is entirely possible, conversely, that the most ancient panins – the ancestors of the chimpanzee and bonobo, our closest living relatives – walked on two legs just like their hominin contemporaries. The only trait that is in fact generally accepted as a reliable marker of our evolutionary branch alone is known as the “non-honing CP3 complex”. It has nothing to do with what most people would say if asked what makes us human. It describes the manner in which, when our jaws are closed, our canines and third lower premolars meet.
Our uncertainty about the nature of humanity is compounded, too, by the realisation in recent decades that the deep past is a far messier place, biologically speaking, than had long been assumed. Most researchers now believe that, for most of the past several million years, numerous hominin species in fact lived simultaneously, much as Homo erectus, the Denisovans, the Neanderthals, and our own species once did. But, setting aside the interbreeding that almost certainly took place – another complication – only one of the hominin species from any given epoch is our actual forebear; the others are our forebear’s cousins, you might say. For purely statistical reasons, we are far more likely to dig up bones from these cousins, who did not give rise to us, than from the rare species that did. In communicating their findings to the lay public, palaeoanthropologists often speak of finding human “ancestors”, but, unless they are referring to the genus Homo, that is only shorthand. “In a pinch, it’s the sort of thing you can tell the media,” one researcher told me. But it isn’t, strictly speaking, true. …
Beauvilain’s photograph constituted the first public confirmation of the femur’s existence. It gave Macchiarelli an opening. In 2004, Bergeret had taken several laboratory photographs of the bone. Macchiarelli now brokered the publication of two of them on the widely read blog of John Hawks, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and longtime Sahelanthropus sceptic.
My caricaturing of paleontologists does not apply to Dr. Hawks, who is immensely sane, and not just for a paleontologist.
In principle, to print images of someone else’s unpublished fossil was a clear breach of ethics. But then, Macchiarelli, Bergeret and Hawks reasoned, after Beauvilain’s article, the femur was no longer unpublished.
The photographs went up on Hawks’s blog in the summer of 2009.
If you have the time, read the whole article for free at The Guardian.
But never forget that human paleontology, the creation of theoretical superstructures of relatedness based on a small number of fossils, is Science with a capital S. It’s not racist pseudoscience such as coming up with categories of relatedness from the DNA scans of huge numbers of living humans.
That article really was good -- it's nice to a see a long-form piece that rings true because it doesn't seem to be politicized or have been written primarily to score points somewhere. Proof: both of the feuding paleontologists seem like obsessed jerks you definitely wouldn't want to have a beer with.
Three thoughts: 1) Steve gives the public too much credit about their sophistication about science. Most people treat science like religion as coming down from heaven, if it’s the right religion of course. And yes science is still burdened by Newton 300 years later. Science has never been and never will be so clean ever again as this article kinda of shows.
2) our scientists are truly amazing in their ability to explain the world given how little information we truly have.
3) I miss reading newspapers. I know there is great information in publications like the New York Times or the Guardian but there ridiculous bias turns me off. I despise the NYT putting their editorial on the front page while calling it analyses. I guess that is my failing with my inability to ignore the propaganda. Steve, How do you manage it?
That article really was good -- it's nice to a see a long-form piece that rings true because it doesn't seem to be politicized or have been written primarily to score points somewhere. Proof: both of the feuding paleontologists seem like obsessed jerks you definitely wouldn't want to have a beer with.
Three thoughts: 1) Steve gives the public too much credit about their sophistication about science. Most people treat science like religion as coming down from heaven, if it’s the right religion of course. And yes science is still burdened by Newton 300 years later. Science has never been and never will be so clean ever again as this article kinda of shows.
2) our scientists are truly amazing in their ability to explain the world given how little information we truly have.
3) I miss reading newspapers. I know there is great information in publications like the New York Times or the Guardian but there ridiculous bias turns me off. I despise the NYT putting their editorial on the front page while calling it analyses. I guess that is my failing with my inability to ignore the propaganda. Steve, How do you manage it?