TM 266-01-063

The reporter asked me where the femur was. She had been circling it for twenty minutes, polite because she had decided I was lying. I told her I did not know. That is true. It has been true for years, and it is not the whole truth, which is: I am the one who filed the leg of humanity in a box stenciled FAUNA, and I have a very good idea where it is now.

Nobody says femur when they can say leg, so the world has spent a month calling it the leg of humanity. The skull that belongs with it has a name. Toumaï. Hope of life in Daza, for a child born in the year it came out of the ground, and the president of Chad gave the world the name in a ceremony in the summer of 2002, and the photograph went around the planet: the small brown face, the heavy brow, the hole at the base of the skull where the spine comes up from below, the foramen magnum in its forward place, which is what habitual bipeds have. More or less what they have. Depending on who was squinting.

The femur has a specimen number. TM 266-01-063. That is not a name. It is a card in an accession file, and in 2003 I wrote the card and filed it in the animal collection, and a femur is not animal material. That is the whole story. Everything else is details, and I have twenty-three years of details, so sit down.

In 2003 I was in my first year of graduate school at the institute in Poitiers, and my job, the real job underneath the seminars, was to inventory the animal material from the 2001 season in Chad. The skull went to a vault in N’Djamena and to the cover of a journal; the rest went to Poitiers in crates, and the crates sat in the loading bay for a year, because everyone with a key was busy with the skull, and then someone remembered the animals, and the animals were given to me.

It is a good job. You learn a site from its fauna, and the Djurab fauna is beautiful: colobine monkeys, antelope teeth worn flat as spoons, crocodile scutes, fish vertebrae, a hippo jaw the size of a cavalry saber. Under the agreement every bone of it belonged to the Republic of Chad. Under practice, the Republic of Chad had the skull, and Poitiers had the everything else, and the everything else was a research question while the skull was a national monument. You can see the sorting. We sort by importance first and by anatomy second. The femur was sorted the day somebody packed it: skull up, femur down, into the box with the monkeys, label, FAUNA.

I do not know if the packing was careless or impatient or just field protocol, which is crate space and hope. The bone is a proximal end, the size of a fist, dark, stained the color of the desert it had lain in, wrapped in paper with TM 266 written in pencil, and when I lifted it out of the colobine box I knew what it was. You know your own kitchen by smell. That is not a scientific sentence. The recognition was instant and total, and I cannot defend it better.

I had spent the semester memorizing proximal femora. Monkeys have a head, a neck, a greater trochanter, and so do hominins, and the difference is in the proportions and in one small thing: a groove in the hollow at the base of the neck, where the obturator externus tendon crosses. The obturator externus is a hip stabilizer. In creatures that stand on one leg for a living it is large, because it is the muscle that helps hold the pelvis level over the standing leg while the other leg swings, and its tendon drags across the bone and leaves a groove, and in habitual bipeds the groove is plain as writing, and in quadrupeds it is small or absent. This femur had the groove, unmistakably.

I stood in the collection room with the leg of the most famous fossil in the world in one hand and a fish vertebra in the other, and the room smelled of dust and old cardboard, and I laughed out loud, alone, and it is a laugh I have rarely had since. They had filed the answer under animals.

There was a small notch on the greater trochanter where the desert had bitten it. I drew it in the margin of my seminar notes that night, and I have kept that notebook, and I will explain why later.

I took the femur down the hall to my advisor’s office. Fairness first: he is the man who named the species, and he had spent two years being shot at for it. The old geography of the field said hominins evolved east of the Rift, and Chad is west of the Rift, as far west as you can go and still be in the story. The skull was already an insult to the map. A femur that said walked would have been a correction, and the field does not welcome corrections, and we both knew that correction would be retried for a decade by people whose careers were built on the old map. That is not an excuse. It is context, and the context, the science, and the politics all pointed the same way, and that is the part nobody says into a microphone: they agreed. They all pointed at the box.

The conversation was short.

“It’s a hominin femur,” I said.

He took it from me and held it up to the window light, turned it over, looked at the groove, put it on his blotter.

“You can’t assign it.”

“There is no rule against trying.”

“The species is diagnosed on the cranium.” An address he had given many times. “There is no association between this element and the skull. The site is a bone bed. Scattered, reworked, mixed. You cannot prove they are the same individual, and if you cannot prove it you cannot publish it as Sahelanthropus, and if you cannot name it nobody will fund it, and there is an end to it.”

“It walked,” I said. “Look at the groove.”

He did not look at the groove. “I have defended the foramen magnum of that skull in four countries. It is the kind of evidence that gets retried. I do not have it in me to defend a femur in every country on earth, and that is what this is, if I am wrong about it, for the rest of my life.” He slid the femur back toward me. “It goes back in the box with what it was found with.”

“That’s where you file a fact you don’t like?”

“That’s where we file a fact we can’t prove. If you are right, someone will come back for it. If you are wrong, it is where it belongs.”

And I, twenty-four, with the most famous fossil in the world in my hands, did what I was told. I walked back to the collection room, wrapped the femur in its paper, laid it in the colobine box, under the label, because a label is how a drawer knows what it is allowed to hold. I closed the box. I closed the drawer. I went back to my desk and sat looking at my hands, and I understood that I had been refused, which is not the same as understanding what I had agreed to.

This is the part that does not fit the headline, so the headline leaves it out. I did not fight it. I did not write the letter. I became, in the years after, the world’s expert on the proximal femora of Miocene monkeys, which is a field of exactly the right size to hide in, and I published the monograph of the Toros-Menalla fauna, the cargo of the crates, and I described every bone in that box in permanent ink, except one. I took the femur out of the manuscript before submission and held it over the wastepaper basket, and I did not drop it in, and I did not put it in the book, and the book came out and nobody noticed, and I told myself I had done it to protect the bone from a bad reading, and I told myself that for another decade.

In 2008 a hospital scanner came to Poitiers for a week, for the skull. I brought the femur down with a tray of monkey femora and put it in the queue myself. The technician asked. I said comparative material. It was. The scans are clean, and they are mine, and they live on a drive in my desk drawer, the second drawer I have used to keep that bone from the world.

I visited the first drawer. Fifteen years I opened it, checked the box, closed it. He was right, my advisor, every time: nobody came back for it. Nobody looked at it. The field preferred the skull’s evidence, which was a maybe, and the maybe was a hole in a cracked skull, and the skull had been under the ground for seven million years and had come out flattened, and some people said the flattening could fake the position of the hole, and the field argued about a crack in a skull and shelved a walk.

In 2018 a group in Paris asked, through my advisor, to study the animal femora of TM 266. The request was about monkeys, as the box said. I was not in Poitiers that spring. He knew the drawer. Maybe he believed the femur was a monkey femur. A careful person could believe it: proximal femora of Miocene monkeys and hominins are close enough to disagree about, and disagreement is a career, and the box said what the box said.

The paper came out in 2020. I read it on a train. “The femur TM 266-01-063, surface collection, is morphologically most consistent with a cercopithecoid proximal femur, with no features indicating habitual bipedalism.” They had measured my femur. They had photographed my femur. They had filed it as an animal in print, forever, and the paper thanked my catalogue, as if I had been pointing at the box with them, as if I had chosen.

I went to the collection the week after, to stand where I always stood, and the drawer opened as it always opened, and the box was not there. I had let the visits lapse, which is how grief works and how inventory works. The 2020 paper sent me back. I pulled the drawer to the stop and stood looking at the clean rectangle in the dust where the box had been. My hands were shaking before my mind would take the news, and between the two of them, the body and the mind, there is a moment of clear sight, and mine said: someone knew the drawer. Someone knew the number. Someone knew the box and took it, and no one will ever know, because the 2019 reorganization was a joke, cabinets moved, boxes rehoused, nothing inventoried, and down in the basement there is a room of cardboard that is officially where everything went, and I went down there and stood in the cardboard, and my box was not among it.

I went back up and I did not file the report. Nobody can tell you what flagging a missing specimen costs, but I can tell you: you flag the femur and you own the femur, you own the drawer you closed in 2003, you own the label you wrote, and the whole world tells you it told you so. Also the femur belongs to the Republic of Chad by the agreement, and the Republic of Chad would have questions, and the questions would have a podium, and I was not ready to stand on it. So I closed the drawer and I said nothing, and I have been saying nothing ever since. A reporter would call it a coverup. I call it a vigil.

In 2021, at a conference in Marrakesh, a Chadian researcher found me at the coffee machine. She is the curator at the research center in N’Djamena, small, grave, dressed like a person who will not be underestimated, and she said: “You wrote the monograph, so you know the collection better than anyone alive. Where is TM 266-01-063?”

And I, who had been waiting twenty years for someone to ask, discovered I was not ready. “The collection is in reorganization,” I said. “The box is misplaced.”

She looked at me, and I knew she knew, and I knew she knew I knew.

“The world lost it,” she said. “A filing error the size of a continent.”

“Yes,” I said. It was all I had.

She paid for the coffees. It is the politest interrogation I have ever been through.

In 2022, a team working from the 2020 photographs and from a cast that had been made before the loss, because the original was unavailable, read the groove as the track of the obturator externus tendon and called the femur a habitual biped’s, and the feud began in earnest, and it is conducted entirely in the subjunctive, in rooms the bone has never been in. Someone at a meeting asked where the original was. The answer was the reorganization. The answer has been the reorganization ever since, and the reorganization is wearing thin.

By then I had started putting the scans on the screen instead of in the drawer. That is what took me from the visitor at the grave to the author of a paper: not courage. A database. I spent the years after 2022 assembling four hundred proximal femora: living apes, living monkeys, the fossil hominins, Orrorin’s femur from Kenya, Ardipithecus, the Australopithecus sample, and my femur, in scans so clean the groove reads like a page. The method is shape analysis, and the conclusion is the thing: the TM femur falls with the hominins, the groove is deep, and habitual bipedalism at seven million years in the Chad basin is the parsimonious reading of the proximal femur. I said every cautious thing the science requires. I did not assign the species. You cannot; it is a bone bed, and the femur is a femur and the skull is a skull, and nothing articulates, and I wrote that in four places, and the world read the title.

My advisor wrote when the paper went up. He is old now. The letter said: I always knew you would come back to it. It said nothing else about the femur, and I have sorted that sentence a hundred times, and I have begun to suspect it means something other than apology.

The firestorm: the camp that owns the skull saying the species stands on the cranium, which it does, and the camp that owns the leg saying a cranium that cannot be read for bipedalism has nothing to stand on. Then the accusation, finally, out loud: you had the leg for twenty years and you did not analyze it because it complicated the face. The unflattering answer is priorities. The skull had a name and a ceremony. The femur had a number and a drawer, and you do not schedule the analysis of a drawer. The reporter asked me why I had waited. I gave her the true answer: the database, the method, the scans, the years of nobody noticing. She wanted the other answer, and I did not give it, because the other answer is a drawer I closed in 2003, and closing it was mine to answer for. “Priorities,” I said, and she wrote it down.

At a symposium in May, a colleague put up my slide, the proximal femur enlarged, a photograph of my scan, and the room argued for an hour about whether the groove was a muscle scar, a breakage, or a pathology. People who have never touched the bone, standing, at volume, in a building the bone has never been in, while the bone itself was somewhere I could not name without handing it back to those people, the one thing I have forbidden myself to do. I sat in the front row and I did not tell them. It is the closest I have come to liking the femur.

A month later the curator I had met in Marrakesh called me. “You made it speak,” she said. A silence. “Come and see it.”

“See what?”

“Your bone.”

I held the phone and I did not ask the question, the one with the drawer in it, and she did not answer it, and that is how I knew.

I flew to N’Djamena in June. You have not felt heat until you have felt Chad in the month before the rains. She met me at the airport and drove me through the city, and I looked at the streets and thought that this was the country that gave the world the face of its ancestor and kept none of the legs for itself, and I did not say it, because it was not my place.

She took me into the museum in the afternoon, when the visitors were gone. We passed the skull on the way. It is in a case, lit, the small brown face, the heavy brow, hope of life, and I can look at it without thinking about the argument, which the field has never managed. Then past the cases, past a staff door, down stairs, along a corridor of shut doors, and she opened one, and it is a room of steel drawers, the kind that hold slides, and she pulled one, and it made the sound a drawer makes.

There is one box in it. Grey cardboard, the width of a hand. On the lid, under tape, a card with two lines. The first line is typing: TM 266-01-063. The second line is handwriting: Sahelanthropus cf. tchadensis, and under it, Toros-Menalla, Djurab. No mention of anything animal. It is the first correct label the femur has ever had. The first label it ever had, the wrong one, is mine, in the accession file of a collection in another country, in another life as far as this room is concerned.

She opens the box. The femur is inside, wrapped in fresh paper, and the moment it is in my hand I know it. The same weight. The same warm dark stain, the color of the desert it had lain in. The same small notch on the greater trochanter, the one I drew in the margin of my seminar notes in 2003 and checked against them before I flew, like a woman checking a scar on the face of the missing.

“It’s the same bone,” I say.

“Of course it is,” she says.

I do not ask where she got it. I ask who else knows.

“He died in March,” she says, and it takes me a moment to understand that she means my advisor, and that the letter that said I always knew you would come back to it was a goodbye, and that she has just answered my question: two people, and one of them is me.

“He gave me the drawer,” she says. “Before the reorganization. He said a box should not live where it could be lost twice. He was slow to your answer. He arrived.”

I think about the letter, and about the drawer I have just closed again, on the only evidence that ever settled anything, and I am not sorry. The skull got the name and the ceremony. The femur got the number and the drawer. That was the sorting, and it was wrong, and it has been corrected quietly, by hand, in the dark.

“You will not announce it,” I say.

“Will you?”

I have practiced the answer. “I told a reporter I did not know where the femur was. I will keep telling her.”

She nods, and she closes the box, and she pushes the drawer in, and the sound it makes is a small one, and it is the sound of something being put where it belongs.

She walks me back the way we came, past the skull in its lit case, hope of life, the small brown face that the world agreed to call us. She does not say anything about it, and neither do I.

Outside, June in N’Djamena, heat standing on the ground, and I walk to the corner and keep walking, and the city is full of the thing the femur proved, all of it walking, without a name for it. The argument will go on from photographs, in rooms the bone has never entered, for the rest of my career, and none of it will touch the bone, because the bone is home, in a drawer, in a box, under a correct label, in the country named for the lake it walked beside, and the lake being dry changes nothing. It walked. It always walked. It is walking now, on this street, in this heat, and I am doing it too.