Michel Brunet
Professor at the Collège de France, Chaire de Paléontologie humaine, Paris; Member of the Institut International de Paléoprimatologie et Paléontologie Humaine Évolution et Paléoenvironnements (IPHEP), Faculté des Sciences, Université de Poitiers, France
Breaking the Wall Around the Secrets of Our Origins. How Early Hominids and Their Paleoenvironments Can Explain Our Species
Where did our lives originate? As Homo sapiens, we have this question wired into our DNA. For Michel Brunet (1940), human paleontology holds the key to an answer. His big break came in Central Africa, during one of his many expeditions searching for fossils: he discovered the skull and several jaws of a late Miocene hominid, whose remains are believed to predate the earliest previously known hominid, Lucy, by more than three million years. Brunet gave it the nickname Toumaï, meaning “hope of life” in the local Goran language of Chad. What can the remains of a life lived millions of years ago tell us about how we live our lives today – and what does it mean that it originated in Africa? For his work Brunet received the Dan David Prize, given to those whose outstanding research contributes to better understanding the world. Brunet, a member of the French National Order of Merit and the French Legion of Honour, serves as professor of Human Paleontology at the Collège de France in Paris, and also as a researcher at the Institut International de Paléoprimatologie et Paléontologie humaine, Évolution et Paléoenvironnements (IPHEP), where he currently leads diggings for fossil mammals and primates in Chad, Libya, Egypt and Cameroon – what are the next “hopes of life” he will discover?
