20th century saw inherited scientism and social Darwinism, and men drew up historical trials, engraving the recognition of the meaning of the words “crime against humanity” in law and collective memory (London Agreement of August 8, 1945, Statute of the International Military Tribunal).
When ontology disappeared from thought in favor of a scientist and materialist ideology, in the sense of the reduction of all that is thought, to blind physico-chemical determinisms, the psyche no longer had a basis to justify the difference between a being defended by rights, on the one hand, and biology, the object of experimentation in the laboratories programing the killing of the individual, on the other hand.
Death is as sacred as life, the human reflexive consciousness is not insensitive to it, and paleoanthropologists now had to seize this sensitivity. Prehistorians understood this. The human singularity manifests itself through the creation of meaningful expressions, and thus through symbols, a kind of transcendence without which forms and movements are neither signified nor significant, and this transcendence also applies to Man, whose reflexive consciousness calls itself “human” and covers its body with symbolic adornments.
Prince Albert 1st of Monaco (1848–1922) was aware of the importance of the heritage of the Grimaldi Caves, which were enriched with new Cro-Magnon burials. The prince followed the courses by the chairs of the Muséum, in particular in paleontology with Albert Gaudry. In 1895, he took the decision to personally supervise the excavations in the sectors of the caves still intact according to his own method. This method consisted of stratigraphic surveys of the archeological and faunal furnishings with their spatial coordinates. In 1897, advised by Armand de Quatrefages, he entrusted the scientific supervision to a French team composed of a young geologist attached to the paleontology chair of the Muséum, Marcellin Boule, the Toulouse prehistorian Emile Cartailhac (1845–1921) and the anthropologist René Verneau (1852–1938). The latter had been asked to bring back skeletons from Guanches (Canary Islands), similar to the Cro-Magnon race, for the Muséum’s collections. The Prince’s excavations were a success. In 1901, two new skeletons, one adult and one child, were discovered in a stratigraphic context, confirming the Upper Paleolithic age of the tomb of Cavillon and going back to the Gravettian culture (28,000 years). On the strength of this immense success, the Prince created the Musée d’Anthropologie préhistorique de Monaco.
René Verneau convinced him to organize the 13th International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archaeology in Monaco. The Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle was represented by Marcellin Boule. The Prince accepted and the congress took place at the Palais de la Mer in April 1906:
Today the Palais de la Mer welcomes Anthropology [...]. The progress of Maritime Biology and Zoology allows us to use the revelations of Paleontology to constitute the scale of the infinitely numerous transformations through which a force, which we call life, has caused organic matter to pass. And Meteorology, so intimately linked with Oceanography by ceaseless relationships, helps us understand the fluctuations, migrations and geographical distribution of beings, including those of Man. (Albert Grimaldi, Prince of Monaco, Discours d’ouverture, 1906, author’s translation)
Marcellin Boule (1861–1942) was born in Auvergne, in the volcanic Massif Central of France. He was fascinated by geology from his adolescence. He studied medicine at the University of Toulouse, and that is where he met Emile Carthailhac, who introduced him to paleontology and prehistoric excavations. A scholarship enabled him to travel to Paris to attend classes at the Collège de France given by the Muséum’s professors, and that is how he met Albert Gaudry in 1886. Gaudry advised him to study geology applied to paleontology and entrusted him with a thesis entitled “Essai de Paléontologie stratigraphique de l’Homme” (Essay on the stratigraphic paleontology of man). It was a first that would make history and serve as a methodological reference. After this training in Paris, he returned to his native regions to pursue a thesis on the volcanoes of Auvergne at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. The University of Montpellier offered him the chair of Paleontology, but he chose to join Albert Gaudry at the Muséum, who immediately entrusted him with the organization of the new gallery of Paleontology in collaboration with Ernest Hamy (Armand de Quatrefages chair), while the gallery of Comparative Anatomy was managed by Paul Gervais’ successor, Georges Pouchet (1833–1894) (see Volume 1). The gallery was inaugurated with great pomp and circumstance in 1898 by the President of the Republic. Albert Gaudry left his chair in 1902, Marcellin Boule was elected professor of the Muséum and holder of the chair of Paleontology in 1903. The geologist had been able to judge the state of fossilization of the bones collected in Java by Eugène Dubois when he came to Paris. He did not adhere to the Pithecanthropic thesis; for him, the skull cap was that of a very large gibbon. A secular republican, Boule was committed to Lamarck’s Transformism and conscious of the reductionism of the Darwinist doctrine, as defined by Haeckel.
From July 1, 1901, a French law prohibited associations from providing education without the agreement of the State, and religious congregations were forced to flee abroad. This was particularly the case for the Jesuits, with their apostolic schools, novitiates and scholasticates, who found refuge in Hastings (Great Britain), Jersey, Monaco, Belgium, Spain, Italy and Holland.
Abbot Henri Breuil entered the Muséum’s sphere of influence during his studies at the Grand Séminaire of Issy-les-Moulineaux in 1895, during which he discovered the theory of evolution thanks to an abbot, Jean Guibert, professor of natural sciences and friend of Albert Gaudry. Breuil discovered a passion for prehistoric art. In 1902, Émile Cartailhac invited him to study the cave paintings in the caves of Marsoulas (Pyrenees) and Altamira (Spain). Henri Breuil understood how the animal Homo sapiens was a living being different from other animals, at a time when France was going through a violent anticlerical crisis that sought to control the national education system, and thus the colleges of religious congregations, as well as the major seminaries (Hurel 2011). On December 9, 1905, the law on the separation of Church and State was passed. It proclaimed freedom of conscience: the State was neutral, religious doctrines were taught in the free schools of the congregations, they were no longer to intervene in the field of scientific research, hard sciences and humanities financed by the State.
Five years after the election of Marcellin Boule, a national event, but one of international scope, marked human paleontology with the discovery of the oldest burial site. It was 60,000 years old and it was not that of a Cro-Magnon Man, but that of a Neanderthal.
1.2.3. The first Neanderthal Man in French territory and his 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
