Embryogeny and Phylogeny of the Human Posture 2. Anne Dambricourt Malasse

ancestor in Germanic lands

In August 1908, France discovered its first skeleton of Neanderthal Man in southwest Corrèze, in a small cave in the commune of La Chapelle-aux-Saints. The skeleton was of an adult, it was articulated, and therefore had not moved since its burial. The discoverers were the three Bouyssonie brothers, Amédée (1867–1958), Jean (1877–1965) and Paul (1887–1972). It was almost complete and analyses of the burial conditions confirmed its intentional origin. The Muséum de Paris purchased the fossil and added it to the paleontology collections, rather than the anthropology collections. The skeleton was therefore under the responsibility of Marcellin Boule. A Neanderthal could finally be compared to the Cro-Magnon Men.

      At the beginning of the 20th century, the Muséum became the leading research establishment in Europe because of the importance of its collections and the organization of its teaching and development with 16 chairs. The research of the extinct anatomical stages between fossilized monkeys and Homo sapiens had finally found its institutional basis. Study of the Neanderthal skeleton was entrusted to the chair of paleontology, at the head of the largest fossil collection in the world. This choice formalized the birth of evolutionary human paleontology as an academic discipline. It was a consecration to the memory of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who had dared to imagine a century earlier, in 1802, a mere 100 m away, the inconceivable filiation of present-day apes and Man from a line of common ancestors. It was recognition for the posterity of Etienne and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who for years fought against the dogmatism of Georges Cuvier and his many disciples. It was an immense gratification for Albert Gaudry, who carried the gallery of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy at arm’s length, both seen as second-order disciplines, classifiers, with no interest in the real concerns of the human condition.

      Gaudry died on November 27, 1908, a few days before the presentation of the skeleton from La Chapelle-aux-Saints to the Académie des sciences by the director of the Muséum on December 14, 1908. From now on, Homo sapiens could set off in search of its anatomical, cultural and spiritual origins, in the long history of the Earth, discovering very old rituals celebrating the departure of a deceased person, whether Sapiens or Neanderthal. The Biblical Genesis was nothing more than a collection of texts written by humans who disappeared more than 2,000 years ago, one moment among many, in the continuity of distant human lineages where the questioning of the meaning of gestures was already consciously manifested, up to the killing of the hunted animal and the human, sometimes consumed. Prehistory was the true book of memory that kept the traces of the emergence of consciousness and its search for meaning. Its archives confirmed the singularity of humanization with the need to signify and to signify oneself, from conception to death, the need to name in order to make the collective understanding of a common reality in permanent interaction with the world intelligible.

While France discovered its Neanderthal, a German industrialist with a passion for the origins of Man, Otto Schoetensack (1850–1912), obtained a Hominid mandible in a sandpit that he had carefully monitored near the village of Mauer in the Heidelberg region. The jaw was short and broad, massive, with a low mandibular ramus that was very extensive on the surface, corresponding to a powerful masseter (masticator) muscle and a pronounced prognathic symphysis that excluded it from the Homo sapiens morphology (Schoetensack 1908). Its stratigraphic position was well identified and gave it a much older age than the Neanderthal of La Chapelle-aux-Saints. Schoetensack named the fossil Homo heidelbergensis. Its recent dating is 600,000 years old, that of La Chapelle-aux-Saints is 60,000 years old. Prince Albert 1st of Monaco visited Marcellin Boule in his paleontology laboratory in Paris. Prehistory and human paleontology did not have a research center. The materials from the excavations, both archeological (tools carved in stone, bone and ornaments) and fauna, were stored in the museums and there was no specialized study laboratory, and consequently, no teaching chair. It was then that a large-scale project took shape with the Prince and Henri Breuil, supported by Marcellin Boule. Animal fossils had their cathedral in the Jardin des Plantes, human fossils would have their palace outside the walls of the Garden, thanks to a foundation offered by the Prince under French law and recognized as being of public utility.

      In France, a foundation is “a patronage organization that makes a patrimony available to serve a cause of general interest. It is created by decree in the Council of State, after the request has been examined by the services of the Ministry of the Interior”.

      1.2.4. The Institut de Paléontologie Humaine, a foundation of Prince Albert 1st of Monaco

      The Institut de Paléontologie Humaine (Institute of Human Paleontology) was created on July 23, 1910 with the personal funds of Prince Albert 1st of Monaco. The foundation owed much to exchanges with Henri Breuil. Completed in 1914, the building is a veritable palace built over five levels with a floor area of 1,200 m². The three facades are decorated with friezes that catch the eye of the passer-by, illustrating different cultures, from different latitudes, Inuit, native Americans, central Africans, converging toward the monumental entrance door, which takes up the style of glass and wrought iron of the great gallery of paleontology.

      The skull of the La Chapelle-aux-Saints Man is enthroned above the porch, while on either side, an artist has carved a profile of a buffalo or sculpted the body of a naked woman in the rock (the Venus of Laussel, in the Dordogne, dating to the Gravettian period). The skull of the Cro-Magnon Man is on the left, that of La Chapelle-aux-Saints on the right, associated with prehistoric ornaments. Part of the coat of arms of the Principality of Monaco overlooks the monumental entrance, but the two monks and the motto “Deo Juvante” (“with God’s help”) have been removed to mark the secular spirit of the place. By climbing the steps to the porch, the visitor understands that here, Man is studied not only in his animality, but also with what makes him a singular being in the evolution of the animal kingdom, through the expression of a symbolic thought that is revealed through the creative act of the artistic gesture.

The architecture is organized around a conference and exhibition room under a huge glass dome, whose height occupies the first three levels, a large library, three rooms for the collections corresponding to the three teaching chairs: human paleontology, fauna and prehistoric ethnology, plus photography and chemistry laboratories, as well as a drawing room and work offices. Marcellin Boule was the director-administrator, Henri Breuil held the chair of prehistoric ethnology, René Verneau held the chair of prehistoric anthropology and Hugo Obermaier (1877–1946) held the chair of geology applied to prehistory. The First World War postponed the inauguration of the foundation by the President of the Republic until December 23, 1920, in the presence of Prince Albert 1st:

      It is to help anthropology overcome the barriers that separate it from the complete truth that I founded the Institute of Human Paleontology, giving it all the necessary independence to lead our spirit towards the light. And I entrust its interests to men who serve Science with a sincerity capable of developing its strength and protecting its march against the influence of passionate interventions. (ibid., author’s translation)

      Marcellin Boule was now the director of the Paleontology Laboratory of the Muséum and the Institut de Paléontologie Humaine (IPH). He was at the head of the largest scientific organization covering the study of the evolution of fossil species, with collections, laboratories and teaching chairs. The paleoanthropological collections were rapidly enriched from 1909 to 1921, following the exceptional discovery of Neanderthal burials in the Ferrassie Cave in the Dordogne (southwestern France), containing two adults, three children, a newborn and two fetuses. The IPH thus became the first research center in the world entirely dedicated to the study and understanding of the origins of the human being.

      Boule published his imposing monograph on the skeleton of La Chapelle-aux-Saints between 1911 and 1913 (Boule 1911–1913). At the same time, Henri Breuil transmitted the evolutionary doctrine of the chair of paleontology in his courses at the Institute:

      In order to see all these forms come out of a single origin, we have to suppose three things: humanity began in a single region, probably towards the East, the human body was able to transform, the first men dispersed, living in physical and moral conditions that profoundly modified their organisms. (Breuil, in Hurel