Michel Brunet (paleontologist)

Michel Brunet (born on April 6, 1940) is a French paleontologist and a professor at the Collège de France. In 2001 Brunet announced the discovery in Central Africa of the skull and jaw remains of a late Miocene hominid nicknamed Toumaï. These remains are believed to predate the earliest previously known hominid remains, Lucy, by over three million years.

Brunet was born in 1940 in Vienne, in the region of Poitou. After having passed his first years in the countryside, at 8 he moved with his family to Versailles. He took a Ph.D. in paleontology at the Sorbonne and then became Professor of Vertebrate paleontology at the University of Poitiers, specializing in hoofed mammals.

A turning point in Brunet's career was when he heard that paleoanthropologist David Pilbeam was searching for fossil apes in Pakistan and the ancestors of the hominids. This spurred Brunet to form with his colleague Emile Heintz a team with the idea of also searching for extinct apes across the border from Pakistan in Afghanistan. The expedition was unsuccessful, and no fossil apes were found.

In the 1980s Brunet and Pilbeam matched together and moved to Africa. Their idea was to verify the theory of Yves Coppens that hominids had first rose in the savannas of Eastern Africa. The two paleontologists idea was that the shores of Lake Chad were particularly indicated to work as a magnet for mammals, and maybe also hominids. In 1984 searching begun in Cameroon, but the nine field seasons spent there were discouraging, with no hominids found.

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