Boule was a professor at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris (1902–1936) and "for many years director of the Institut de Paléontologie Humaine, Paris." The fossil discovered in
La Chapelle-aux-Saints was an old man, and Boule characterized it as brutish, bent-kneed and not a fully erect biped. In an illustration Boule commissioned, the Neanderthal was characterized as a hairy
gorilla-like figure with
opposable toes, according to a skeleton which was already distorted with
arthritis. As a result, Neanderthals were viewed in subsequent decades as being
highly primitive creatures with no direct relation to anatomically modern humans. Later re-evaluations of the La Chapelle-aux-Saints skeleton have roundly discredited Boule's initial work on the specimen. He was one of the first to argue that
eoliths were not human made. Boule also expressed some skepticism about the
Piltdown Man discovery — later revealed to be a hoax. As early as 1915, Boule recognized that the
jaw belonged to an
ape rather than an ancient human. However, the Piltdown forgery has been characterized as providing evidential support for Boule's "branching evolution" conclusions drawn from his Neanderthal research — research which is likewise said to have "prepar[ed] the international community for the appearance of a non-Neanderthal fossil such as Piltdown Man." ==Personal life and demise==