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Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

Neanderthal as Image and ‘Distortion’ in Early 20th-Century French Science and Press

ETH, Rämistrasse 36, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland; fax +41 44 632 1561; sommer{at}wiss.gess.ethz.ch

This paper investigates an historical episode that involved an object that was both scientific and popular. In 1908, the first almost complete Neanderthal skeleton was discovered at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France. From its very rebirth, the specimen became an object of interest to scientists holding different views of human evolution. It also was of interest for a public whose Catholic and anti-clerical stances were voiced through the press, and for the modernist clerical prehistorians who had discovered it. Conceiving of reconstruction as referring to either verbal or visual representation of the caveman from La Chapelle-aux-Saints, this paper discusses the multiplication of Neanderthal images in newspaper articles and illustrations that expressed particular scientific and political interests. This treatment of the newspaper as a site of encounters and knowledge production among these various constituencies is afforded by a set of newspaper excerpts on the specimen collected by the first person to physically reconstruct the bones, Marcellin Boule, at the Mus éum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. While the newspapers were welcome allies in the dissemination of the discovery and of the scientist's renown at home and abroad, Boule might have been less content with the way in which the various papers represented his work – or was he? As an object associated with such large issues as religion, evolutionism and nationalism, the ‘Old Man from La Chapelle-aux-Saints’ had to fulfil contradictory desires and his images multiplied accordingly.

Key Words: history of anthropology • human evolution • science and the press • science and religion • scientific and popular visualization/reconstructio

Social Studies of Science, Vol. 36, No. 2, 207-240 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0306312706054527


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