Michel Brunet removes the cracked, brown skull from its padlocked, foam-lined metal carrying case and carefully places it on the desk in front of me. It is about the size of a coconut, with a slight snout and a thick brow visoring its stony sockets. To my inexpert eye, the face is at once foreign and inscrutably familiar. To Brunet, a paleontologist at the University of Poitiers, it is the visage of the lost relative he has sought for 26 years. "He is the oldest one," the veteran fossil hunter murmurs, "the oldest hominid." Unearthed from sandstorm-scoured deposits in northern Chad's Djurab Desert, the astonishingly complete cranium-dubbed Sahelanthropus tchadensis (and nicknamed Toumaï, which means "hope of life" in the local Goran language)--dates to nearly seven million years ago. Over the past few years, researchers have made a string of stunning discoveries-Brunet's among them-that may go a long way toward bridging the remaining gap between humans and their African ape ancestors. With Sahelanthropus have come new answers--and new questions. Sahelanthropus exhibits a number of apelike traits, such as its small braincase and widely spaced eye sockets. This mosaic of primitive and advanced features, Brunet says, suggests a close relationship to the last common ancestor. Thus, he proposes that Sahelanthropus is the earliest member of the human lineage and the ancestor of all later hominids. Fossil records of hominids show that multiple species existed alongside one another during the later stages of human evolution. Whether the same can be said for the first half of our family's existence is a matter of great debate among paleoanthropologists.