by Lydia Pyne
Boule’s reputation in the area of human evolutionary research was legendary and his interest in a find as spectacular as the remains from La Chapelle-aux-Saints would have been unmistakable. Boule’s own research and work with fossils and geology ranged from Europe to the Middle East, including northern Africa, and his expertise was in correlating sites with geological strata; this meant that Boule was able to establish finds within their proper geologic timeline. Boule was also committed to the processes of disseminating science and information—he was the editor of L’Anthropologie for forty-seven years, until 1940. When Boule received the Bouyssonies’ letter in 1908, he immediately agreed to study the La Chapelle skeleton, which would arrive at his museum laboratory in early 1909.
The question of where to send the skeleton for analysis isn’t and wasn’t as straightforward as one might imagine. While the Bouyssonies were confident that Boule’s interest and expertise in prehistory and anatomy would offer a scientifically valid interpretation of their discovery, Boule’s institutional association with the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle played a significant factor. In early-twentieth-century France, archaeology and natural history shared strong historical ties with the theology of the Catholic Church—a relationship typical of the nineteenth century. The question of whom to send it to and where it would be studied had political as well as archaeological significance. Since the skeleton was recovered near the village church—and the excavators were respected clerics—all of the subsequent discussions about where to actually send the bones were mediated through church connections. The other possible destination for the skeleton, the École d’Anthropologie, was simply less appealing to the clerics; this was mostly due to the École’s radical politics and its commitment to a philosophy of materialism, to say nothing of its anticlericalism. The École’s former director Adrien de Mortillet had argued that “the basis of the universal law of morphological and cultural progress, paleoanthropology and Paleolithic archaeology were political weapons for radical socialist aims, with human history as an integral part and logical consequence of human prehistory.”9 This was a political position rather off-putting to the abbés Bouyssonies, to say the least.
While the École d’Anthropologie might have had the scientific expertise to examine the Neanderthal from La Chapelle, it lacked the standing between science and prehistoric research acceptable to the Catholic Church. Thus the École’s loss was the Muséum’s gain and the skeleton went to Boule.
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For the next two years, Boule analyzed, sketched, and studied the Old Man’s skeleton, and his 1911 publication, L’Homme Fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints, was a masterpiece. The monograph was a complete summary of the Old Man, beginning with the fossil’s excavation and ending with comparisons to other Neanderthal specimens across Europe. L’Homme was filled with chapters of anatomical descriptions, careful measurements, and photographs of the specimen as well as the site of La Chapelle itself.
Each chapter of L’Homme showed tables of careful measurements and comparisons with other Neanderthals (most comparisons were made with the Neanderthal from Spy, Belgium, discovered in 1886) as well as other great ape populations. Under Boule’s direction, Monsieur J. Papoint, of the Laboratoire de Paléontologie at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, contributed dozens of pen-and-ink sketches and photography to L’Homme; these sketches were anatomical comparisons between the Old Man and modern humans, in addition to drawings of the stone tools found in the La Chapelle site’s original excavations.
The book also contained sixteen beautifully detailed stereoscopic reprints of each bone from the skeleton—the 1911 version of 3-D data sharing. The stereoscope was an important tool for laboratory and scientific work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for a variety of scientific disciplines, including paleoanthropology. The stereoscope expanded what researchers were able to “see” and how they were able to see it, in the same way that telescopes and microscopes expanded the visual possibilities for other sciences centuries before. A stereoscopic plate contains two slightly offset views of the same image, and these images line up with the viewer’s left and right eyes. Thanks to the power of binocular vision, the brain “combines” these two images into one, creating the illusion of three-dimensional depth.10
At 278 pages, Boule’s work was comprehensive, his comparisons thoughtful, and his research judiciously in keeping with other then contemporary tomes of prehistory and anatomy. Because L’Homme Fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints was the first and most comprehensive publication of Neanderthals in scientific literature, it established the La Chapelle skeleton as the most complete reference for new Neanderthal fossils discovered—thanks in no small part to Boule’s detailed studies. Although the 1856 Neanderthal 1 from Germany was the species type specimen—the fossil that researchers had designated as best defining Neanderthals—the La Chapelle skeleton quickly became the go-to fossil for researchers.
Stereoscopic images (above and opposite) allowed readers to “see” the subject in 3-D; for the La Chapelle Neanderthal, this meant that readers could “view” the skull without needing access to a cast of the fossil. Printed in Marcellin Boule’s L’Homme Fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints, 1911.
While Boule worked on his magnum opus, archaeological excavations in France accelerated. Prehistorians realized the archaeological potential of the caves and were quick to begin subsequent excavations in the area. By 1911, three years after the excavations of La Chapelle, the sites of Le Moustier, La Ferrassie, and Cap Blanc had all been excavated by a variety of research teams, and several prehistoric skeletons had been recovered. (Boule actually used parts of a La Ferrassie Neanderthal skeleton, excavated between 1909 and 1911, to fill in missing pieces to the La Chapelle specimen.) Some of these post–La Chapelle skeletons were immediately classified as Neanderthal using the guidelines that Boule had pioneered, while others, like Cap Blanc, were a bit more tricky to sort out taxonomically. With Boule’s detailed anatomical and cultural assessment of La Chapelle’s Old Man, there was a framework for the newer, post–La Chapelle skeletons. Since Boule’s descriptions and reconstructions of La Chapelle became the basis for any and all Neanderthal research that was conducted from the early to mid-twentieth century, his conclusions went unchallenged for decades.
Just what were Boule’s conclusions about the Old Man? And how did L’Homme de La Chapelle-aux-Saints describe Neanderthals as a species? According to Boule, the Old Man was a truly sad specimen of nature. He was unable to walk upright properly and certainly wouldn’t have been capable of any kind of complex behavior or cultural sophistication. Boule reconstructed this skeleton with a severely curved spine, giving the Neanderthal a stooped, slouching stance; he gave the Old Man bent knees and a head that jutted forward. Boule believed that the low-vaulted cranium (the oblong shape that had earlier intrigued Fuhlrott and Schaaffhausen in the 1850s) and the large brow ridge were indications that the crania and the brain it encased were primitive and not as advanced as Homo sapiens, meaning that early humans would have lacked intelligence and cultural sophistication—a rather comfortable explanation for Neanderthals’ evolutionary demise. Boule gave his reconstruction an opposable big toe like the great apes, even though there was no compelling reason to justify this interpretation and it was simply one more anatomical characteristic that made Neanderthals less like Homo sapiens. In short, Boule described the Old Man as what we might see today as a kind of archetypical caveman—not a charismatic Fred Flintstone but a savage, shuffling troglodyte bumbling his way across glaciated Europe.
Boule’s reconstruction and reading of Neanderthals had the ability to appeal to a variety of scientists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Boule presented the Old Man as a missing link in the chain of human evolution (pointing to key features of the fossil’s anatomy), but he refused to use the species as an intermediate between apes and humans. This particular view of human evolution meant that Boule did not necessarily think that fossil species
operated by a strict unilinear model, where every extinct fossil species would neatly line up according to ancestral relationships, ultimately ending with Homo sapiens. Boule’s evolutionary model allowed for philosophical and taxonomic flexibility in how researchers could think about models of evolution. This approach allowed that—no matter what evolutionary model a researcher ascribed to—Neanderthals could and ought to have a place in it, and Boule’s careful study certainly set expectations and grounded interpretations of the Neanderthal species. Any subsequent studies of the Neanderthal skeleton would have to intellectually deal with Boule and Boule’s original interpretation as well as any new Neanderthal bones. Boule’s work became a “type” of sorts—a type case for how to complete a thorough examination of skeletal anatomy, for negotiating tricky parts of evolutionary theory, and for folding a fossil into a broader milieu of science and popular culture.
Back in the Dordogne region of France, Amédée Bouyssonie, Jean Bouyssonie, and Louis Bardon published the results of their archaeological excavations at La Chapelle-aux-Saints in L’Anthropologie in 1909. As a result of their incredibly detailed excavations in the region, they collected over one thousand artifacts from the La Chapelle bouffia. In addition to the Neanderthal skeleton, other mammalian bones were recovered in the cave: rhinoceros, horse, wild boar, bison, hyena, and wolf, not to mention a plethora of stone tool artifacts. After Boule concluded his study of the Old Man, the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris purchased the remains for 1,500 francs in 1911. The two Bouyssonie brothers went back to their excavations in the grottes—bouffias—in south-central France and continued to contribute monographs and manuscripts to the Société Préhistorique Française through the 1950s.11
Photograph of the Neanderthal’s skull in situ before its removal during excavations at La Chapelle. Published in Cosmos, July 1909; similar photographs were published in Boule’s L’Homme Fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints, 1911.
So what did the Old Man really bring to the scientific table? It was an entire specimen. It was in a burial context. The fossil was carefully excavated in situ—none of the other Neanderthals could really be considered as having been collected through archaeological excavations. It had been excavated by experts, studied by experts, and entered the scientific literature through “proper” channels. The Old Man’s credentials, as it were, were impeccable. La Chapelle was the right type of find in the right place at the right time—a celebrated specimen that could preside over the nascent discipline of paleoanthropology. Even more than the Neanderthal species type specimen, Neanderthal 1 from Germany, the Old Man of La Chapelle became the referential type specimen—the archetype—for what scientific and public audiences expected from Neanderthals.
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The Old Man created a cacophony of publicity for the Neanderthal species. Early twentieth-century artists, scientists, and media formed a triumvirate that promoted interest in Neanderthals. The Old Man also caught the public imagination, thanks in large part to a series of newspaper articles that had some serious academic and popular clout. (Boule himself collected press clippings that described his work with this specimen.) Due to changes in both newspaper printing technology as well as the advent of compulsory elementary education, articles published in print had the potential to reach a large number of readers—the belle époque of French print journalism—and those many readers could and would meet the Old Man. The entire status of a newspaper article underwent a rapid transformation, legitimizing it as a media source and, in turn, sanctioning the subjects it published.12
The press wasn’t just a tool of cultivated classes anymore; it had clout and power and offered scientists who published in the paper considerable fame and political influence. Photos and reconstructions of the La Chapelle-aux-Saints Neanderthal published in newspapers like L’Illustration, the Illustrated London News, and Harper’s Weekly served as go-betweens for “academics” and “the public”—translating scientific ideas to multiple audiences. The Old Man became immensely popular and publically recognizable through Frantisek Kupka’s sensationalized art of the Illustrated London News—where a hairy apelike creature crawled along cave walls. Paintings by the eminent paleoartist Charles Knight in the early 1900s, however, offered a more nuanced and reflective take on Neanderthals. Knight’s paintings in the American Museum of Natural History offered museumgoers a rather empathetic slice of Neanderthal evolutionary history, showing social groups with hunting technology.13
Neanderthal reconstruction by F. Kupka, Illustrated London News, 1909. This reconstruction has practically become iconic as an example of the bias of early-twentieth-century understanding of Neanderthals.
As Boule’s science began to work its way out of the lab and into newspaper articles and museums, Neanderthals began to pique public interest in other ways, particularly through literature. The Old Man found an interesting place in popular imagination thanks in large part to the fledgling genre of science fiction. In the imagined science fiction worlds of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and other early sci-fi authors, unexplored geographies, Darwinism, and mechanical inventions populated their alternative worlds. For the Belgian writers and brothers Joseph Henri Honoré Boex and Séraphin Justin François Boex, the caves and archaeological sites of Europe provided a perfect backdrop for imagined, speculative histories, and Neanderthals were a perfect species to populate them. Once the Old Man moved out of Boule’s laboratory, the Boex brothers wrote him into a sci-fi novella, giving the Old Man a popular, culturally recursive dimension that Boule could only dream of.
The two brothers published La Guerre du Feu—translated into English years later as The Quest for Fire—under the nom de plume J. H. Rosny in 1911, the same year as Boule’s L’Homme Fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints. (Short articles about the Old Man had been published between 1908 and 1911, providing the Boex brothers with sufficient Neanderthal source material for their novella.) Science fiction is a powerful genre to explore a certain type of history of science, through speculation about possible scenarios. It takes a discovery (like a fossil species) and asks, “What if?” And it’s this what-if that invests the audience in the Neanderthals. For the brothers, Neanderthals were more than just the sum of their archaeological artifacts. Neanderthals were characters who could have motivations and desires, agency and history.
The Quest for Fire is set in the late Paleolithic, where several hominin groups vie for the mastery of fire. Characters who can master, control, and—most significantly—make fire will be the ones who emerge as evolutionary successes. By 1909, there were three major types of fossil species agreed upon in scientific literature—Pithecanthropus (fossils from Java, in Southeast Asia, which we call today Homo erectus), Neanderthals, and “ancient humans,” a hodgepodge grouping of fossils loosely attributed to very old Homo sapiens. The authors build a cultural progression, pitting “savagery” against “civilization.” Tribes of these long-extinct species would need to master cultural behavior to be evolutionary successes. The crux of the human condition lay in the ability to create fire from flint tools.14
In the novella, the Neanderthals lose the stored embers of their fire due to an attack by a barbaric tribe—Homo erectus. In a key opening scene, after the Oulhamrs (Neanderthals) have lost their fire, the tribe’s leader, Faouhm, raises his arms toward the sky and yells, “What will become of the Oulhamrs without Fire? How shall they live on the savanna and in the forest? Who will defend them against shadows and winter blasts? They will have to eat raw meat and bitter plants, never to warm their limbs, and their spearheads will remain soft. The lion, the saber-toothed tiger, the bear, the tiger, the giant hyena will eat them alive during the night. Who will recapture Fire?”15
The novella was made into a now cult classic film in 1981. In the film, as in the novella, once fire is lost, it has to be gathered. Humans—not Neanderthals—are the only ones with the ingenuity and ability to master fire. Most significant, however, is an appeal to an innate ingenuity that surrounds fire—to create it
, to care for it, and to anthropomorphize it. (A colleague of mine summarized The Quest for Fire as “Ron Perlman goes camping. For two hours. With no dialogue.”)
Joseph and Séraphin Boex were fascinated by why Homo sapiens survived and Neanderthals did not: What gave one species an evolutionary edge for success and not the other? For the Boexes, the answer for humans’ success lay squarely with their technological and cognitive superiority—humans had the tools and the smarts to succeed where Neanderthals did not. Today, over one hundred years after the Boex brothers published their novella, archaeological research offers a very different interpretation of Neanderthal life. Archaeologists consider Neanderthals just as smart, just as technologically apt, just as culturally nuanced as Homo sapiens. Despite this shift in interpretation, the Neanderthal-as-hapless-caveman motif is so firmly entrenched in our cultural consciousness that it is exceptionally difficult to dislodge it. Boule’s work might have given the original Quest for Fire scientific credibility when it was first published, but the novella has given a story and life to Boule’s interpretation of the Old Man that endures much longer than any nonfiction about the fossil.16
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After his discovery, description, and immortalization in fiction, the Old Man’s own story, as it turns out, was far from over. Well into the mid-twentieth century, scientists would continue to examine and reexamine the Old Man’s skeleton as well as his burial context. In the initial excavations and reports, Jean Bouyssonie had noted that the origin of the pit was not natural. In other words, Bouyssonie believed that other Neanderthals in the Old Man’s social group had purposefully dug the pit in the cave’s floor. For the Bouyssonies as well as Boule, the “unnatural origin” meant that the site was a burial, with the Old Man’s corpse deliberately placed there.
