Bust of a Neolithic chieftain

Louis Mascré (1871-1929) was a Belgian sculptor. Aimé Rutot (1847-1933) was a mining engineer, geologist and prehistorian. He earned his spurs with the geological map of Belgium, and was a curator of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels. Rutot is renowned for his reconstructions of ‘primitive human races’ that he commissioned Mascré to render as busts.

The Neolithic or New Stone Age (6500/6000-3000/2500 BCE in the Low Countries) was a period in human history characterised by the development of agriculture and livestock farming. People used heavy, polished flint axes for large-scale deforestation in order to gain new agricultural land. The flint mines in Spiennes in Hainaut were among the most important in Europe.

The bust of the Neolithic man belongs to a series of statues of ‘primitive human races’ conceived by the prehistorian Aimé Rutot. He based his ideas on archaeological finds, but was also influenced by the 19th-century ‘theory of cultural evolution’, which proposed that ‘primitive races’ were out-competed by more ‘civilized’ peoples. The statues of the ‘primitive peoples’ bear strong resemblances to groups of people who were considered ‘savage’ and ‘underdeveloped’ at the time.