The Mousterian tool culture is named after Le Moustier, which was first excavated from 1863 by the Englishman Henry Christy and the Frenchman Édouard Lartet.

During this process, the skull received considerable amounts of damage; for example, after it was sold to the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, a dentist broke the alveolar bone to access the teeth.

It was later damaged in the Allied bombing of Berlin during the Second World War, then looted by the USSR, which returned the remains of the skull to the German Democratic Republic in 1958.

[3] The skull is now missing many parts, the teeth glued into the wrong position, and it has been dipped into glue, covered with varnish, and painted with plaster.

[4] Study of the artifacts found in Le Moustier reveals the use of glue made from a mixture of ocher and bitumen by Middle Paleolithic humans to make hand grips for cutting and scraping stone tools.