Ancient Skull at Center of Spat

Oct. 9 -- A skull with a prominent brow and small face is at the center of an ugly spat between anthropologists who disagree over whether it belonged to a gorilla or human ancestor.

If Michel Brunet of the University of Poitiers in France and his colleagues are right, the 6 million- to 7 million-year-old skull Brunet's student found in the sands of Chad in 2001 represents humankind's oldest ancestor.

If Milford Wolpoff of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and two French colleagues are correct, the skull is merely the remnants of a strange female gorilla.

At stake is scientists' understanding of human evolution, not to mention a few researchers' reputations.

"We don't really want to beat [Brunet] up about this," says Wolpoff, who was the lead author of an article criticizing Brunet's findings in this week's issue of Nature, "but his comparisons just don't make sense to us."

Skull Was a ‘Nuclear Bomb’

Brunet counters that he has presented enough evidence to prove the skull was a hominid, whereas Wolpoff has offered no proof that the skull belonged to a gorilla. He adds that the University of Michigan anthropologist never even viewed the skull or casts of the skull firsthand, but instead relied on descriptions from his co-authors who saw casts of the skull and from Brunet's original report on the find.

"I'm not at all surprised that this specimen has generated alternative opinions; that would be expected," says David Pilbeam, a professor of anthropology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., who assisted in writing Brunet's rebuttal in Nature. "But I am surprised that people would write such radically different opinions without spending time looking at the specimen."

When Brunet announced his find this past July, it was described as having the impact of a "small nuclear bomb" in the field of anthropology. The age of the find and the skull's radically unique features suggested that human evolution was a much messier process than scientists had envisioned.