Lmst

#Toumaï : ce fossile qui remet en question l’histoire de l’humanité http://sci3nc.es/TM66nV

The curse of Toumaï: an ancient skull and a bitter feud over humanity's origins

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/may/27/the-curse-of-toumai-ancient-skull-disputed-femur-feud-humanity-origins

#HackerNews #Toumai #Feud #HumanityOrigins #AncientSkull #FossilDiscovery

"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."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/may/27/the-curse-of-toumai-ancient-skull-disputed-femur-feud-humanity-origins

The skullduggery over #Toumai involved suppression of possible evidence that it was not in fact a #hominin (bipedal) fossil.

'When she returned, she found that her research materials had been confiscated; the fossils were being “renumbered”, she was told. At one point, however, Bergeret said, one of her advisers appeared with the femur in his hand. “This piece,” he warned, holding it before her: “You forget you ever saw it.”'

#anthropology #palaeoanthropology #Sahelanthropus

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/may/27/the-curse-of-toumai-ancient-skull-disputed-femur-feud-humanity-origins?CMP=share_btn_url

"Fossils promise untold knowledge; fossils promise worldly fame. Often they withhold both; sometimes they drive people mad." #Paleontology #Toumaï

The curse of Toumaï: an ancien...