| Page 177 | |
through the Academie des Sciences, flatly rejected his claims in 1846.
Jacques Boucher de Perthes
(Science Photo Library)
Ten years later Boucher de Perthes experienced a kind of rehabilitation. In 1858 the Geological Society of London, largely prompted by the great hugh falconer, visited Abbeville to examine his evidence and to compare it with material found in England. In 1859 the Royal Society of London upheld that “flint implements were the product of the conception and work of man,” and that they were associated with numerous extinct animals. In 1859 Albert Gaudry, the French Natural History Museum’s paleontologist, defended Boucher de Perthes’s findings to the Academie des Sciences, and this time that learned establishment recognized the antiquity of mankind and the evidence for it. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published that same year.
References
Van Riper, A. Bowdoin. 1993. Men among the Mammoths: Victorian Science and the Discovery of Human Prehistory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
(1861–1942)
Marcellin Boule was born on 1 January 1861 at Motsalvy, in the French province of Cantal and was introduced to the natural sciences in his youth by the local pharmacist, Jean-Baptiste Rames, who was also an amateur geologist. Boule studied first in Toulouse and took degrees in natural science and geology. While there, he met the prehistorians and cave art specialists emile cartailhac and Louis Lartet, and they introduced him to paleoanthropology and prehistory. In 1886, he won a scholarship to Paris to study, and there his chief mentors were Ferdinand Fouque, a geologist at the College de France who introduced him to petrography, and Albert Gaudry, a paleontologist at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. In 1892, Boule became Gaudry’s assistant at the museum and succeeded him as professor of paleontology in 1903, a position he held to his retirement in 1936.
Boule received the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur for his reorganization of the museum’s paleontology gallery, which was opened in 1898. He was one of the founders and editor (1893–1930) of the distinguished journal L’Anthropologie. Boule was the unrivaled leader of French paleontology in the first third of the twentieth century, receiving the Huxley Medal from the Royal Institute of Anthropology of Great Britain and Ireland and the Wollaston Medal from the Geological Society of London. He taught and inspired many French paleontologists.
Two major works stand out from his prolific output. The first is the study of the La Chapelle-aux-Saints skeleton, in which Boule was able to explain his ideas on paleontology by proposing an original identification and reconstruction of Neanderthal man. He insisted that Neanderthals could not be ancestral to modern man, that they were a genuine fossil with no descendants. He was to use the same argument later about Homo erectus, the pithecanthopines discovered in Indonesia and China. He believed that there was a yet-to-be-found hominoid ancestor from which modern humans had descended.
The second major work is his popular book Les hommes fossiles, eléments de paléontologie humaine (1921), which summarized his thinking
| |