La Chapelle-aux-Saints: The 'Old Man' and the Neanderthal Image

The Old Man of La Chapelle-aux-Saints is a Neanderthal skeleton discovered in 1908 in a small cave in the Corrèze region of south-western France. Buried roughly 50,000 years ago, it was the most complete Neanderthal skeleton then known. The way it was first studied produced the enduring image of Neanderthals as stooped, shuffling brutes, and the way that image was later corrected is one of the great revisions of human prehistory.

The discovery in 1908

On 3 August 1908 three Catholic priests with a keen interest in prehistory, the brothers Amédée and Jean Bouyssonie and Paul Bardon, were digging in a low cave known as the Bouffia Bonneval, close to the village of La Chapelle-aux-Saints. Beneath layers containing stone tools and animal bones they found the skeleton of an adult male lying in a shallow pit cut into the floor of the cave.

The body lay on its back with the legs drawn up, in a roughly east–west orientation. Around it were flint tools of the Mousterian type, the stone-working tradition associated with Neanderthals, and bones of animals such as reindeer, bison and horse. The finders recognised at once that the skeleton was very old and that it resembled the Neanderthal remains already known from Germany and Belgium.

The bones were sent to Paris, to Marcellin Boule (1861–1942), a palaeontologist at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle and one of the most respected specialists in fossil humans of his day. That decision shaped how the world would see Neanderthals for half a century.

Marcellin Boule’s reconstruction

Boule published his study in a series of monographs in the Annales de Paléontologie between 1911 and 1913. It was the first detailed scientific description of a nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton, and in many respects it was careful and thorough. It also contained interpretations that later proved badly wrong.

Boule concluded that the man had walked with a bent-kneed, slouching gait. He described the spine as lacking the curves that allow modern humans to stand straight, the head as thrust forward on a short neck, and the big toe as diverging slightly like that of an ape. He judged that the brain, though large, was organised in a primitive way. In his view the Neanderthals were a dead-end side branch of human evolution, not ancestors of modern Europeans.

These conclusions were quickly popularised. In 1909, even before Boule’s full monograph appeared, the Illustrated London News printed a drawing by the Czech artist František Kupka showing a hairy, ape-like figure based on the La Chapelle find. Museum displays, textbooks and later films repeated the image of the hunched caveman for decades.

The real Old Man

The skeleton belonged to a man who had lived a hard life. He had lost most of his teeth well before death, and the sockets had healed over. His spine, hips and other joints showed severe degenerative arthritis, and he had a healed rib fracture. Because of the tooth loss and joint disease he was nicknamed the Old Man, although estimates of his age at death vary, and many researchers now place him somewhere around 40 or older rather than in extreme old age.

His skull is large and long, with a heavy brow ridge, a low forehead and a projecting midface, all typical Neanderthal features. Boule estimated the cranial capacity at around 1,600 cubic centimetres, larger than the average for living people. This alone sat uneasily with the idea of a primitive brain, and later scholars noted that brain size and shape say little about intelligence on their own.

Some researchers have suggested that a man with so few teeth and such painful joints must have depended on others for food and help, which would point to care within his group. Others caution that he could still have eaten soft or processed food unaided. The question remains open.

How the image was corrected

The first major challenge came in 1957, when the anatomists William Straus and A. J. E. Cave re-examined the skeleton. They argued that Boule had mistaken the effects of arthritis for normal anatomy and that Neanderthals had stood and walked fully upright. They famously suggested that a Neanderthal, washed and dressed in modern clothes, would draw little attention in a crowd.

Later work went further. Studies of the feet showed that the big toe was in line with the others, as in modern humans. Analyses of Neanderthal tools, hearths, burials, pigments and personal ornaments revealed complex behaviour. Ancient DNA, from 2010 onwards, showed that Neanderthals interbred with modern humans, so that many living people carry a small share of Neanderthal ancestry.

In 2019 a team led by Martin Haeusler published a detailed study of the La Chapelle-aux-Saints spine and pelvis. Using virtual reconstruction, they showed that the man had a curved lower back and an upright posture similar to ours, despite his disease. The specimen that had created the stooped image thus ended up refuting it.

Was it a deliberate burial?

From the start, the finders argued that the man had been deliberately buried, which implied that Neanderthals cared for their dead. Sceptics later questioned this, suggesting the body might have come to rest in a natural hollow and been covered by sediment.

Between 1999 and 2012 a team led by William Rendu and colleagues re-excavated the Bouffia Bonneval and nearby caves. In a 2014 paper they reported that the pit had been dug into the cave floor, that the skeleton was well preserved with little sign of disturbance by carnivores or weathering, and that it must therefore have been covered quickly. They concluded that this was an intentional burial. Not every specialist accepts every detail, but La Chapelle-aux-Saints is now widely cited, along with sites such as Shanidar Cave, as evidence for Neanderthal burial practices.

Legacy

The Old Man of La Chapelle-aux-Saints became the type of the classic Neanderthal, the specimen against which others were compared. It is also a lasting lesson in how scientific interpretation can be shaped by assumptions. Boule’s reading of the skeleton fitted a view of human evolution in which Neanderthals were too primitive to be relatives, and an arthritic individual was taken as typical of a whole population.

Today the Neanderthals are seen as capable, upright humans adapted to Ice Age Europe and western Asia, who made sophisticated tools, controlled fire and buried some of their dead. The original skeleton remains in the collections of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, while the village of La Chapelle-aux-Saints has a small museum devoted to the find.

Timeline

• c. 56,000–47,000 years ago: A Neanderthal man is buried in the Bouffia Bonneval cave (commonly cited range).
• 1908, 3 August: Amédée and Jean Bouyssonie and Paul Bardon uncover the skeleton.
• 1909: The Illustrated London News publishes František Kupka’s ape-like drawing based on the find.
• 1911–1913: Marcellin Boule publishes his monograph describing a stooped, primitive Neanderthal.
• 1957: William Straus and A. J. E. Cave argue that Neanderthals walked fully upright.
• 1999–2012: New excavations re-examine the burial context.
• 2014: Rendu and colleagues publish evidence that the burial was intentional.
• 2019: Haeusler and colleagues show the man’s spine had a normal upright posture.

Why it matters

La Chapelle-aux-Saints gave the world both its most famous Neanderthal and its most famous mistake about them. The story of how a single arthritic skeleton created the caveman stereotype, and how later study overturned it, shows why fossils must be reread with new methods and fewer assumptions.