The small cave of La Chapelle aux Saints is in the Correze department of southwest France. In 1908 a skeleton of Neanderthal man was found here buried in a level of Mousterian (Quina) type. In a famous study by Marcellin Boule, it was made the type specimen of Homo neanderthalensis, supposedly an extinct line of human evolution. Boule also initiated the view that this type of man was stooping in posture and essentially different in body structure from modem man. We still recognize significant differences in the skull, such as the large forward-positioned face and very large nose, as well as the long low braincase and brow ridges; but anthropologists now know that the skeleton was little different from that of today. The La Chapelle man was deformed pathologically by chronic osteo-arthritis and other degenerations often found with old age today.
The Macmillan dictionary of archaeology, Ruth D. Whitehouse, 1983Copied