This stereotypical depiction of ancestral humans in popular culture traces its origins to "the old man of La Chapelle", a relatively complete "Neanderthal" skeleton discovered in France in the early 20th century and reconstructed by Pierre Marcellin Boule. The skeleton was from an old man with age-related deformities to begin with, and Boule - a scientist who rejected the idea that Neanderthals could have been ancestral to modern humans - put his thumb on the scale and reassembled the skeleton so as to make it appear more ape-like. The discovery was relatively popular, and photos and artist renderings of the skeleton were widely distributed at the time.

The distortion ended up being ludicrous in the context of more modern paleontological discoveries - particularly that of Lucy. Lucy was discovered in the '70s and was enormously significant because she was fully bipedal (upright) yet had a brain the size of a chimpanzee's (Lucy lived about 3.3 mya, long before the much-younger old man of La Chapelle). Prior to this, it had been assumed that our large brains and upright stride had evolved at the same time - one of the assumptions that made Boule's large-brained but ape-postured reconstruction plausible.