Marcellin Boule
Script error: No such module "Template wrapper".Script error: No such module "Check for clobbered parameters". Pierre-Marcellin Boule (1 January 1861 – 4 July 1942), better known as merely Marcellin Boule, was a French palaeontologist, geologist, and anthropologist.[1]
Early life and education
Pierre-Marcellin Boule was born in Montsalvy, France.[1]
Career
Boule was a professor at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris (1902–1936) and "for many years director of the Institut de Paléontologie Humaine, Paris."[1] He was an editor (1893–1940) of the journal L’Anthropologie and was the founder of two other scientific journals.[1]
Boule studied and published in 1911 the first analysis of a complete Neanderthal specimen.[2] The fossil discovered in La Chapelle-aux-Saints was an old man, and Boule characterized it as brutish, bent-kneed and not a fully erect biped.[3] In an illustration Boule commissioned, the Neanderthal was characterized as a hairy gorilla-like figure with opposable toes, according to a skeleton which was already distorted with arthritis. As a result, Neanderthals were viewed in subsequent decades as being highly primitive creatures with no direct relation to anatomically modern humans. Later re-evaluations of the La Chapelle-aux-Saints skeleton have roundly discredited Boule's initial work on the specimen.[4]
He was one of the first to argue that eoliths were not human made.[5]
Boule also expressed some skepticism about the Piltdown Man discovery — later revealed to be a hoax. As early as 1915, Boule recognized that the jaw belonged to an ape rather than an ancient human.[6] However, the Piltdown forgery has been characterized as providing evidential support for Boule's "branching evolution" conclusions drawn from his Neanderthal research — research which is likewise said to have "prepar[ed] the international community for the appearance of a non-Neanderthal fossil such as Piltdown Man."[4]
Personal life and demise
Boule died at age 81 in Montsalvy in France, the same town where he was born.[1]
References and sources
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External links
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