Paul Rivet (1876–1958)

Paul Rivet was a French ethnologist famous for his studies of South American people. He founded the Musée de l'Homme, the anthropology museum, in Paris in 1937. After training as a physician, he took part in the Second French Geodesic Mission to Ecuador in 1901. He remained for five years in South America, studying the Huaorani people of the Ecuadorian Amazon (then known as the Jívaro) in the high Andean valleys. He published several papers on his Ecuadorian research, culminating in a two-volume work co-authored with René Verneau between 1921 and 1922 under the title "Ancient Ethnography of Ecuador." In 1926, he participated in the establishment of the Institut d'Ethnologie in Paris, where he taught many other French ethnologists. From 1940 to 1942, he helped organize and run the French Resistance network at the Musée de l'Homme. His most famous work, "Les Origines de l’Homme American," published in 1943, contained evidence supporting his theories about the origins of the early Americans.