"Father of Our Fathers" by Bernard Werber, summary

This scientific detective novel combines the investigation into the death of an anthropologist with scenes from East Africa’s prehistoric past. The author builds the plot around the solution to a missing link in evolution, transforming paleontological debates into a pursuit of a dangerous discovery. The concept for the novel matured between March 1995 and August 1998, when Werber consulted with anthropologists, physicians, and veterinarians to ground the fantastical conjecture in plausible facts.

This book opens a trilogy about the investigations of Lucretia Nemrod and Isidor Katzenberg. This series also includes the novels "The Last Secret" (the second in the series) and "The Cyclops’s Laughter" (the third in the series).

The Bathroom Riddle and the Water Tower Recluse

Parisian professor Pierre Adjemian writes down a confession about solving humanity’s greatest mystery, after which he is found dead in his own apartment. He sits in the bathtub with a stomach wound, pointing a numb finger at the mirror. A young police inspector blames the death on a serial killer with a hammer operating in the neighborhood. A young, red-haired journalist, Lucretia Nemrod, lives upstairs and examines a room filled with monkey skeletons. At a meeting at the editorial office of the magazine "Getter Modern," columnist Christiane Thénardier ridicules the topic of anthropology. Her colleagues advise the orphaned Lucretia to consult former forensic expert Isidor Katzenberg.

The tower’s inhabitant greets the girl with a cold refusal. Isidor, weighing more than a hundredweight, listens to Dvorak, charts future eras, and rejects violence. The tireless guest leaves the tower empty-handed.

That night, Lucretia descends onto the deceased professor’s balcony via a rope. In his office, she finds a burglar in a monkey mask holding a can of gasoline. The scout stuns the arsonist with blows from the asylum, but the intruder escapes. The next morning, unknown assailants kidnap the journalist right off the street, bundle her into a sedan, and drive her to an abandoned workshop. There, they hang her upside down by a chain, beating her into confessions with slaps.

Then Isidor bursts into the room with smoke bombs. He’d identified his companion by the cell phone’s tracking. Untying the bonds, the detectives force the bandits to flee.

The fat man finally agrees to work together on the case. Together, they return to Ajemian’s sealed apartment. After heating the bathroom with steam, the partners reveal an S-shaped grease mark left by the victim’s finger on the glass. A notebook, covered in powder, reveals the names of three of the scientist’s colleagues from the "Where Do We Come From?" club: astronomer Sanderson, primatologist Conrad, and surgeon Van Liesbeth.

Paris Hypotheses

The Meudon Observatory smells of dust and dampness. The slightly deaf astronomer Benoit Sanderson listens to the radio static of an ancient explosion through computer screens. According to him, the seeds of life were brought to the planet by meteorites, and humanity emerged thanks to a space virus. The scientist admits to having gone deaf after Ajemian’s stupid firecracker. Suddenly, a windowpane shatters into pieces from a thrown cobblestone. The silhouette of a monkey flickers on a park branch.

The trail leads to the Paris Botanical Garden. Professor Charles Conrad paces among the taxidermy of the Gallery of Evolution, defending classical Darwinism and pure chance. For him, Ajemian remained a dangerous charlatan. In the midst of their conversation, a loud bang is heard in the monkey house: a large male shoots the paleontologist in the temple with a blank round from a revolver. Conrad faints.

The Mimosa Clinic greets the detectives with the scent of sterility and the quiet footsteps of Arab sheikhs. Head physician Solange Van Liesbeth operates on exposed organs, advocating Lamarckian ideas: the living body transforms to adapt to the savannah. She keeps bonobos, dwarf chimpanzees capable of pressing ideograms on combination locks. The surgeon confesses to a past affair with Adjemian and complains of threats from conservationists. She refers the visitors to the paleontologist’s ex-wife, Sophie Eluan, who abandoned funding her husband’s excavations to start her own sausage factory.

At the meat-packing plant, the businesswoman’s brother, Lucien, takes guests for a ride in an electric car between endless rows of Big White pigs. The engineer defends the predatory nature of carnivorous hunters, whose brains grew on the succulent flesh of their victims. Suddenly, a crowd of Animal Liberation Front demonstrators smashes down the gates. A massacre ensues. Isidore presses the emergency release switches on the control panel, releasing the sows into the yard. In the chaos, the attacker, dressed in a gorilla skin, throws Sophie over his shoulder, shoves her into the back, and speeds off to the Le Bourget runway. Lucretia, riding a motorcycle, fails to intercept the light monoplane flying south.

Tanzanian trace

Kilimanjaro Airfield blinds tourists with scorching heat. The plane flew through a zone of fierce turbulence while the passengers engaged in theological debates. Lucretia and Isidore rent a jeep and head to Olduvai Gorge.

At the roadside hut "At the End of the World," poacher George offers a whole tire for an hour alone with a girl. Katzenberg agrees to play the ancient game of "three pebbles." A long, empty-handed psychological game ends in victory for the journalist. The Kikuyu host reveals that the sausage maker’s kidnapper is former porn actor and trapeze artist Angelo Rinzuli, abandoned by a film crew in the bush.

At night, at the edge of the Rift chasm, the earth trembles from an earthquake. Lucretia hangs suspended over a sixty-meter abyss, clinging to a snake instead of a vine, until geologist Melchior arrives and pulls them out with a rope. The rest of the journey lies on foot, knee-deep in mud, through swarms of crocodiles and hippos.

Deep in the jungle, the travelers are met by Sophie Eluan and her partner Angelo, guns pointed at them. It turns out the woman followed the acrobat voluntarily. A night in a tent over tea reveals Rinzuli’s theory: prehistoric ancestors reared up for face-to-face sex.

The next morning, the quartet reaches a secluded basin guarded by a troop of aggressive bushbaby lemurs. Gymnast crawls across the clearing on all fours, submitting to the leader’s ritual bites to open the way inside.

In a cave beneath the crater, an automated candy cabinet is discovered, which taught the animals the symbols of the language. From the crevice, reporters retrieve Ajemian’s last will and a thermos filled with polystyrene.

A terrible secret

The professor’s manuscript reveals a hypothesis that shatters all canons. Millions of years ago, a male Australopithecus found himself at the bottom of a karst sinkhole with a wild pig, a warthog. Fleeing hunger, they shared falling mangoes, killed snakes, and engaged in forced copulation. Thus was born the first hybrid, combining characteristics of both mammalian orders. This is the origin of human pink skin, abundant subcutaneous fat, laughter, and complete compatibility of internal organs. A fossilized limb with five digits, topped with hooves, was discovered in the box.

While his companions digest what they’ve read, Angelo grabs the relic, cuts the hanging vine, and leaves his companions trapped in stone, dreaming of selling the rarity at a European auction.

The captives spend seven days below without food, gathering together for hundreds of games of pebbles. On the eighth day, the clever galagos tie a vine to a tree trunk, descending for candy. Having emerged, the explorers rush to France.

In Paris, Rinzuli soars up to the top of the Winter Cirque without a rope. At the end of a dangerous somersault, the acrobat in a gorilla mask suddenly jerks his hands away, and Tarzan falls to his death on the arena floor. Before his death, the acrobat whispers about trees and van number 66.

There, the priest, Father Matthias, intercepts the crate, but it’s snatched from him by the driver of a car. Isidor fires at the tires with an old Mauser pistol. Behind the wheel, it turns out, is the astronomer Sanderson, who was dreaming of saving humanity from shame.

While the scientist is discussing aliens in a café, another accomplice steals the chest. Lucretia discovers the enemy’s lair in a meat-packing plant. Engineer Lucien Eluan takes aim at the journalists, rips off their clothes, and throws them naked into the slaughterhouse hopper, where pigs are slaughtered.

The fate seems sealed. But the animals, doomed to die, form a dense living raft beneath the people’s feet, bite through the bonds with their teeth, and push the strangers to the surface. Lucretia leaves the slaughterhouse, clutching the little piglet Adonis, who had been rescued, to her chest.

The remains are examined in the paleontology museum’s laboratory. Conrad takes scrapings, confirming the mineral’s antiquity, but under an electron microscope, he discovers traces of modern steel. The five-toed foot turns out to be a clever fake: Ajemian himself glued together parts of two different bones, hoping to shake up the scientific world.

Isidore visits Ajemian’s abandoned apartment. An empty freezer with a thin groove on the shelf reveals the final mystery. Dying from an incurable disease, the anthropologist prepared an ice spike, plunged it into his stomach in hot water, and wrote the word "suicide" on the glass with his finger. The ice weapon simply melted in the bathtub without a trace.

Three dolphins are quietly splashing on the roof of a water tower. Lucretia is leafing through the latest issue of a magazine, which features a routine article about Australopithecus without a single mention of their odyssey. Isidore is crying in front of the television screen, watching news of wars, and admits that the real missing link is today’s humanity, which has not yet become human.