The Musée de l’Homme is the anthropology and prehistory museum of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, and it sits in the west wing of the Palais de Chaillot, with windows that look straight at the Eiffel Tower. This guide takes you through one part of the route only, the prehistoric and anthropological one: evolutionary biology, which takes up another stretch, I leave to people who know it better.
It closes on Tuesdays, like the other two museums that share its doorway, and it has one peculiarity that concerns you at the desk: it is the only one of the three the Paris Museum Pass does not cover, because it belongs to the Muséum and not to the national museums. With the pass in your pocket you walk into the Cité de l’architecture and the Marine, and here you pay.
What is a museum of mankind doing in a palace built for an international exposition?
Let’s begin!
1. The hunters in silhouette, and the weapon that changes everything
You come upon them suddenly, at life size: three black cut-out silhouettes, one man and two figures behind him, all with the arm carried back and a long shaft above the shoulder.
Get closer and look at what they are holding, because it is not a spear. It is a javelin thrown with a spear-thrower, a hooked stick that lengthens the arm and multiplies the push: the same shaft thrown by hand travels a few dozen metres, with the spear-thrower it goes much further and much harder. The display sets three figures in a row in the same gesture, and the row is there to let you see the movement rather than the tool.
2. The Venus of Lespugue, broken by the pick that found her
How big is one of the most famous statuettes of European prehistory?
A little over fourteen centimetres. The Venus of Lespugue is a mammoth ivory found on 9 August 1922 by René and Suzanne de Saint-Périer in the grotte des Rideaux, at Lespugue in the Haute-Garonne, and it is between twenty-four and twenty-six thousand years old.
Look closely and you will see she is wounded. The last blow of the pick during the excavation split her into nine main pieces, and the fracture lines are still visible: it was Saint-Périer who put her back together before giving her to the museum, around 1924. What remains is a figure with no face, with a small smooth head, thin arms resting over an enormous volume of breasts and hips, and a body that narrows to a point at the bottom like a lozenge. This is not a woman observed, it is a form thought out: the symmetry is too exact for a portrait.
3. The nineteenth-century busts, and the sentence the museum put beside them
A case with three busts in marble and terracotta: a young woman with flowers in her hair, another with a knotted headdress and fur on her shoulders, an older man with long braids and a crest of feathers.
Read what is printed on the case, because that is where the museum does the hard thing. There is a sentence by Claude Lévi-Strauss from Race et histoire, of 1952: Le barbare, c’est d’abord l’Homme qui croit à la barbarie, the barbarian is first of all the man who believes in barbarism. These busts come from the season when European anthropology measured skulls and sorted people into types, and the museum has neither hidden them nor displayed them as curiosities: it has left them there with the sentence that dismantles them. On the same wall there is also a line from Diderot about the orangutan and the cardinal, and it is worth reading on your feet.
4. The 1937 palace, which explains the museum better than a label
This museum was founded in 1937, by Paul Rivet and inside the palace built for the international exposition of that year, and the two dates belong together. The Palais de Chaillot replaced the old Trocadéro palace, demolished in 1935, and the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro, founded in 1878, became a museum of mankind, with prehistory, anthropology and the cultures of the world under one roof.
A second date is useful for the photographs: the museum reopened on 17 October 2015, after more than six years of works and a complete remaking of the route. Everything you see online that predates it shows a different museum.
Look at the outside before you go in or as you leave: on the stone walls are reliefs from 1937 that tell the continents the way they were told then, with camels, elephants and allegorical figures. They are not neutral decoration: they are the index of a period, and it is exactly that period the route inside now discusses openly.
5. The windows, and one of the best views a Paris museum can give
It is not a room and it is not an object, but it is one of the reasons this museum is worth the visit. From the rooms and from the upper terrace you see the whole Eiffel Tower, with the Trocadéro gardens in front of it, and not through a slit: the Palais de Chaillot was designed to frame it.
Take five minutes at the glass. It is also the point where you grasp the geography of the hill: below you the garden runs down to the Seine, on the other side of the doorway is the Cité de l’architecture, and down to the left, along the river, the line of museums on avenue du Président Wilson begins.
6. Why three museums in one building are not one museum
If all three are behind the same doorway, is there one ticket?
No, and this is the most useful practical fact on the whole hill. Inside the Palais de Chaillot are the Musée de l’Homme, the Musée national de la Marine, the Cité de l’architecture and the Théâtre national de la Danse: four institutions, no joint ticket, three separate desks.
Allow for it when you plan the day. All three museums close on Tuesdays, so the Trocadéro day has to be scheduled on another one; the pass covers two out of three; and each asks for at least an hour and a half, so three in a single day can only be done at a run.
Practical information
Details checked on 25 September 2026 on the official site museedelhomme.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you go.
Tickets. The museum publishes a range, 12 to 15 euros, because the price depends on what is on in the exhibition rooms. It does not publish a detailed table: if you need the figure exactly, ask the museum’s ticket office. Free admission. Entry is free for EU residents under 26, jobseekers, teachers and disabled visitors with their companion. Opening hours. The museum states that it opens every day except Tuesday, without publishing the hours on its own page. The 11:00-19:00 you will find quoted elsewhere comes from two independent sources and matches the other two museums in the same building, but there is no confirmation from the official source. Closing days. It closes on Tuesdays, plus 1 January, 1 May, 14 July and 25 December. Paris Museum Pass. The museum is not included in the pass, because it belongs to the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle. Getting there. The entrance is at 17 place du Trocadéro et du 11 Novembre. The stop is Trocadéro, on lines 6 and 9, in front of the building. How long it takes. The prehistoric and anthropological part asks for an hour and a half, and the whole museum reaches three hours.
The exhibitions on at the museum, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
Behind the other two doors of the same entrance are the Cité de l’architecture and the Musée national de la Marine, each with its own desk. Going down towards the Seine, avenue du Président Wilson leads to the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, free in its permanent collection, and to the fashion museum, the Palais Galliera; on place d’Iéna is the Musée Guimet. And the tower you see from the windows I write about in the Eiffel Tower.
Photo credits: hunters with the spear-thrower and busts with the Lévi-Strauss quotation by Als33120 (CC BY-SA 4.0); Venus of Lespugue by Vassil (CC0), from Wikimedia Commons.
