Description
On an August day in 1856, in the Neandertal Valley in northwestern Germany, a workman in a limestone quarry uncovered the bones of what he thought was a cave bear. He put them aside to show to Johann Fuhlrott, the local schoolteacher and an enthusiastic natural historian. Fuhlrott immediately realized this was something much more significant than the bones of a bear. The head was about the size of a man’s, but it was shaped differently, with a low forehead, bony ridges above the eyes, a large projecting nose, large front teeth, and a bulge protruding from the back. The body, to judge from the bones that were recovered, must also have resembled a man’s, though he would have been shorter and stockier—and more powerful—than any normal man. Making the bones even more significant, Fuhlrott realized, was that they’d been found amid geological deposits of great antiquity.
The schoolteacher contacted Hermann Schaaflhausen, a professor of anatomy at the nearby University of Bonn. He, too, recognized that the bones were extraordinary: “a natural conformation hitherto not known to exist,” as he later described them. Indeed, what the workman had uncovered, Schaaflhausen believed, was a new—or rather a very, very old—type of human being, one that would come to be called a Neandertal. Perhaps, Schaaflhausen may even have suspected, the Neandertals were ancient ancestors of modern man.
If the professor and the schoolteacher expected the scientific establishment to celebrate their discovery, they were sorely disappointed. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, as spelled out in The Origin of Species, was still three years from its publication in 1859.To most scientists, the idea that humans evolved from any other species, let alone one represented by these bones, seemed entirely absurd. Rudolf Virchow, the leading pathologist of the day, examined the bones and declared that they belonged to a normal human being, albeit one suffering from some unusual disease. Other experts followed suit.
By the end of the nineteenth century, however, Darwinism prevailed in most scientific circles. Some scientists, such as Gabriel de Mortillet in France, took another look at the bones and argued that modern humans evolved from Neandertals. The discovery of more Neandertal remains—in France, Belgium, and Germany—buttressed their case. These fossils dated back to between 110,000 and 35,000 years ago, making it impossible to dismiss them as either diseased or modern.