The evolutionary path
Skulls, skeletons and fossil casts from hominins to now.
Fred Romero from Paris, France — CC BY 2.0 · Chabe01 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Javelefran — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Chabe01 — CC BY-SA 4.0
The two are often confused, being near neighbours, but they are **entirely different**. The **Musée de l'Homme** is scientific: the biological evolution of the human species — skulls, skeletons, fossils, genetics, language and environment; you are the subject, as an organism. The **Quai Branly** is a museum of **arts and civilisations**: masks, sculpture, textiles and objects from Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas, in a Jean Nouvel building with a vertical garden. If you can only do one: the Quai Branly is the more beautiful, the Musée de l'Homme the richer intellectually and the better with children.
Yes, and after the Cité des Sciences it is among the best museums in Paris for them. **Skeletons, skulls and fossils** work for almost every age, and the post-2015 display was built with interactive stations, screens and tangible comparisons (put your hand against a Neanderthal's). ⚠ But some sections are **text-heavy and conceptual** and will pass over younger ones. Its great practical advantage: the **Trocadéro terrace** is directly outside the door — they come out to open space and the Eiffel Tower view after an hour in the galleries.
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A museum about **humanity itself**, in a wing of the Palais de Chaillot at **Trocadéro** — the building on whose terrace you stand to photograph the Eiffel Tower, and which gives the most famous view of it in Paris. It reopened in **2015** after a full restoration, and its heart is a permanent exhibition answering three ordered questions: **Who are we?**, **Where do we come from?** and **Where are we going?** — biological anthropology, then human evolution, then the future of the species and its environment. It holds unforgettable material: a collection of **skulls and skeletons** setting out the path of evolution from hominins to *Homo sapiens*, casts of the most famous fossils, and a section on **language** — among the best things in it: how speech arose, and how languages diversify and die. It also treats sensitive matters seriously: **scientific racism** and the history of classifying humans into "races", and how science demolished it. ⚠ This is **not the Quai Branly**: this is about humans biologically and evolutionarily, that one is about the arts of peoples. And from its windows there is a direct view of the tower.
Skulls, skeletons and fossil casts from hominins to now.
How speech arose and how languages diversify and die.
The history of racial classification and its collapse.
17 Place du Trocadéro, 75116 Paris