User:Chaquille/Jean-Baptiste Noulet

Jean-Baptiste Noulet (1 May 1802 – 24 May 1890) was a french scientist and naturalist born in Venerque, France. He is considered one of the pioneers of prehistory and prehistoric archaeology, as he helped to prove the archaeological existence and fossil evidence of humans.

Biography
Noulet attended Montpellier and graduated in 1832 with a doctorate in medicine. He began his medical career but later decided to pursue different interests. He was interested in geology and later paleontology as well, leading him to become appointed as the chair of medical natural history at the preparatory school of medicine and pharmacy in Toulouse in 1841. In 1872, he became the director of the Natural History Museum in Toulouse.

Noulet also specially focused his research on Occitania and its language.

Noulet, through malacology, created a summary analyzing the natural history of terrestrial and fluvial mollusks living in the sub-Pyrenean basin (1834). Additionally, through botany, he published a volume on regional flora of the sub-Pyrenean basin.

In 1838, Toulouse made him chair of agriculture at the Jardin des Plantes. In 1840 He was appointed resident associate of the medicine department of the Toulouse Academy of Sciences, and in the year following he was elected president Toulouse Academy of Sciences.

Scientific Discoveries
In 1851, Noulet discovered remains of Pleistocene fauna in addition to lithic artifacts at Clermont-le-Fort, which seemingly proved the earlier idea held by Jacques Boucher de Perthes that Pleistocene humans and animals coexisted in the same time period.

He also helped to categorize and discover various animal species that had or have gone extinct with their fossilized remains.


 * Adapis rouxi (Noulet, 1863)
 * Lophiodon lautricense (Noulet, 1851)
 * Palæotherium castrense (Noulet, 1863)
 * Aphelotherium Rouxi (Noulet, 1863)
 * Chœropotamus lautricensis (Noulet, 1870)
 * Allaeochelys parayrei (Noulet, 1867)
 * Crocodylus rouxi (Noulet, 1859)

Along with these discoveries, Noulet also made several classifications and discoveries of Invertebrates as well.

Prehistory
Noulet's notoriety namely stemmed from his discovery at Clermont-le-Fort which seemed to prove the existence of the fossils of man. This idea had been heavily criticized when first proposed by Jacques Boucher de Perthes. Despite Noulet's famous discovery, his works were not published until 1862, 11 years after the discovery, which stunted the growth of Noulet's popularity during that critical period of his life. Within the discovery of the prehistory of man, there was evidence that the humans of the Pleistocene interacted with animals that had long gone extinct. There was also evidence of animals that still exist in modern day having interactions with humans in that era in vastly different parts of the world than they now reside in. This furthers the idea that the climate changed dramatically from the Pleistocene to the modern age. The usage of tools by these ancestral humans was also discovered. The culture to whom they belonged was the Châtelperronian, which consisted of peoples from the southwestern region of France and northern "Spaniards". Though Noulet was not the first nor the only scientist to believe in and discover the prehistoric history of man, he was one of the first to delve deeply into the tool usage and coexistence of ancient humans and animals.