The Slatest

Obama Meets 3-Million-Year-Old Ancestor, Misses Chance to Troll Trump With Ultimate Birther Joke

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President Obama touches a bone fragment of “Lucy” alongside Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn (R) and Zeresenay Alemseged (2nd L) prior to a State Dinner at the National Palace in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on July 27, 2015.

Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

“It shows that every single person here, 7 billion people, including Donald Trump, came down through this chain,” Zeresenay Alemseged, the chair of the anthropology department at the California Academy of Sciences, told President Obama as he showed him “Lucy,” the nickname given to the several hundred pieces of bone discovered in Ethiopia in the 1970s that represents the most complete skeleton of an early human ancestor ever discovered. Asked later why he encouraged the president to touch the roughly 3.2-million-old fossils, Alemseged said: “Extraordinary people have extraordinary access.”