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Boule's error: on the social context of scientific knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

David Van Reybrouck
David Van Reybrouck*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Catholic University of Leuven, Blijde Inkomststraat 21, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. [email protected]
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Extract

Introduction

On August 3, 1908, two young French clergymen with a passion for prehistory, the brothers Amédée and Jean Bouyssonie, discovered in a cave near the village of La Chapelle-aux-Sains (Department of Corréze) an almost intact Neanderthal skeleton. Recognizing both the importance of their find and their own inexperience with such fossils, they handed the skeleton to Marcellin Boule, professor of palaeontology at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris.

Keywords

Marcellin BouleNeanderthalancestryscience studiessociology of sciencehistory of archaeology
Type
Special section: Ancestral Archives: Explorations in the History of Archaeology
Information
Antiquity , Volume 76 , Issue 291 , March 2002 , pp. 158 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 2002

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