by Paul Jordan
The Neanderthal may have given its name (ultimately Joachim Neumann’s name) to the prehistoric race now recognized on the basis of the remains of many hundreds of Neanderthal men, women and children, but it was not in fact the site of the first discovery of a Neanderthal individual nor, more widely, of the first discovery of a fossil human being. Pace Cuvier, with his doctrine that ‘l’homme fossile n’existe pas’, genuine discoveries of fossil human beings were being made in his lifetime (he died in 1832), but not properly recognized for what they were, if at all. Human teeth were found in association with the remains of mammoth, cave-bear and woolly rhino in gypsum quarries in Thuringia in 1820, but their discoverer was cowed by Cuvier’s dogma into regarding them as intrusive into an older deposit. In 1823 a human skeleton erroneously identified as female was found in a cave at Paviland in Wales, with marine shells and bone ornaments on the chest, the whole coloured with red ochre and gaining an unfortunate young man of the last ice age the sobriquet ‘Red Lady of Paviland’. The associated fauna included extinct forms of elephant, hyena and rhino. The skull was missing and the whole surviving skeleton (including the pelvis which should have settled the matter of sex) was so modern in form – being, as we know, a Crô-Magnon type of the Upper Palaeolithic period – that it was easy at the time to write it off as again a modern intrusion into an older context. A Roman’s camp-follower was the preferred dismissal at the time, but here was, if only the finder had known, the first sure discovery of a fossil human being in clear association with extinct fauna. Another even clearer demonstration of the antiquity of Man came only two years later in 1825 at Kent’s Cavern, near Torquay in Devon, where human skeletal material was found not only in association with the fossils of extinct animals and flint tools but sealed with them under a layer of stalagmite. The discoverer was deterred from publishing his correct conclusions about his site and news of his work was not reported at the Geological Society in London until 1840, when the geological circumstances were fully expounded, still to no avail.
If a proper recognition of what was found there in 1830 could have been extended to a piece of cranium bone from the cave of Engis on the river Meuse near Liège in Belgium, then Neanderthal Man would today be known as Engis Man instead. Pieces from the skulls of at least three individuals were turned up together with the remains of extinct animals and flint tools. One skull piece, illustrated at the time, afterwards perished and another has since been shown to be indeed an intrusion from about 8000 years ago, but a third cranium fragment we can now recognize as belonging to a Neanderthal child, with the distinctive brow arch development that even small children of the Neanderthal people exhibited. The discoverer of these things was in no doubt as to what he had found: ‘whatever conclusions we like to reach about the origins of mankind, I for one am convinced that a skull of this kind belongs to a person of limited intellectual faculties, that is a man belonging to a lower level of civilization . . .’. He was talking of the admittedly rugged but intrusive later specimen, but the incipiently heavy-browed Neanderthal child fits his words well.
One of the skull pieces from Engis.
And if not many of the bones of fossil man were coming to light in the early half of the nineteenth century, then his stone tools were being found and recognized in increasing numbers. John Frere had seen a few axes at Hoxne at the end of the eighteenth century; from 1840 a French customs officer began reporting them in quantity in old gravels of the Somme in northern France. In 1841 he claimed the discovery of such an axe, shaped by flaking, in association with extinct faunal remains and asserted this as proof of the existence of antediluvian man. Sadly, this Boucher de Perthes worked rather shoddily, mistrusted his workmen who foisted the odd fake on him, illustrated his reports badly and neglected geological data. All the same, he rightly persuaded first the Danish and English exponents of the Three Age System (Stone, Bronze, Iron) and then later on some of his own distrustful countrymen that he really was finding proof of human presence in remote epochs. An English geologist of the time declared Boucher to have provided ‘just as definite evidence of human activity as the knives of Sheffield’. Importantly, the distinguished geologist Lyell, who had developed the uniformitarian theory of geology, accepted Boucher’s ‘antediluvian’ axes. Uniformitarianism had first been championed by a Scottish geologist of the late eighteenth century named James Hutton who proposed that the main causes of the formation of the geological features of the Earth were not the drastic impacts of some cyclical scheme of divinely imposed catastrophes (as Cuvier thought) but rather the slow workings of familiar processes of sedimentation in oceans, seismic elevation of strata and erosion by the weather. His idea inevitably suggested that long periods of time were involved and he wrote rather poetically of a world with ‘no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end’. Lyell had taken on Hutton’s ideas and was prepared to accept evidence for the existence of man in remote epochs, just as he accepted that the geological features of the Alps were not the results of the Flood but of extended glaciation in the distant past, but it is interesting to note that he was not at first inclined to embrace Darwin’s godless mechanism of evolution by natural selection.
But the idea of evolution by some means, though pushed out of many people’s minds by the catastrophic creationism of Cuvier, was kept alive in the 1840s by works like Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation which, though it again lacked any notion of natural selection, contained the clear idea of species’ varying in adaptation to circumstances. Chambers was prepared to countenance human evolution and presciently observed that evolution, which he called here ‘the development hypothesis’, ‘would demand . . . that the original seat of the human race should be in a region where the quadrumana are rife’: in other words, the apes and monkeys.
If Neanderthal Man quite comfortably escaped being called Engis Man, thanks to the difficulties involved in recognizing a lone Neanderthal child, then his escape from being called Gibraltar Man was a narrow one indeed and, if there was any justice, that would be his name now. For in 1848, during fortification work at Forbes Quarry, North Front, Gibraltar, one of the most complete of all Neanderthal skulls ever found was turned up, and the heavy brow arches, pulled-forward face and huge nasal opening of the race were so unmissable in this specimen that some of the arguments over the actual Neanderthal find of nine years later might have been avoided if this discovery had been recognized at the time. (The facial area of the Neanderthal skull is absent from the material turned in by the workmen who recovered – and probably broke up – the material from the Feldhof cave.) As it was the Gibraltar woman’s skull languished in obscurity in the local museum for many years, finally making its way to London and recognition only after the Neanderthal discovery. One of the English geologists who had supported Boucher then suggested the scientific name Homo calpicus (after the classical name, Calpe, of Gibraltar) for the Gibraltar female Neanderthal and, if he had been able to do it earlier, that might more or less be the scientific name of Neanderthal Man to this day: Homo sapiens calpicus instead of Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.
The Gibraltar skull.
Back in 1857, when the first scientific assessment of the remains from the Neanderthal were undertaken, it was fortunate that they came into the hands of an open-minded anatomist, Professor Schaafhausen of Bonn University. It is interesting that Schaafhausen had published in 1853 a paper on ‘The Stability and Transformation of Species’ in which ideas of the mutability of species and of human descent from apes were discussed. Fuhlrott sent him a plaster cast of the cranium in early 1857 and in June they presented a lecture together at the Natural History Society of the Prussian Rhineland and Westphalia, in Bonn. Fuhlrott described the circumstances of the find and set out claims for the great age of the human bones in the light of their location under so much cave deposit and of their fossilized state. Schaafhausen at this stage was able to give a brief description of the Neanderthal bones and already to state his conclusions about their implications, to
quote his own words:
1) that the extraordinary form of the skull was due to a natural conformation hitherto not known to exist, even in the most barbarous races;
2) that these remarkable human remains belonged to a period antecedent to the time of the Celts and the Germans, and were in all probability derived from one of the wild races of north-western Europe, spoken of by Latin writers; and which were encountered as indigenous inhabitants by the German immigrants; and
3) that it was beyond doubt that these human relics were traceable to a period at which the latest animals of the diluvium still existed; but that no proof in support of this assumption, nor consequently of their so-termed fossil condition, was afforded by the circumstances under which the bones were discovered.
Side view of the Neanderthal skullcap showing ‘bun’ at the back and heavy brows at the front.
Schaafhausen was clearly stating that the highly unusual shape of the Neanderthal skull, in particular, was not due to disease or injury but represented a previously unmet early form of human being in the natural state of that creature, who must belong to times at least as remote as those of the last of the line of extinct animals.
After subsequent closer examination of the Neanderthal bones, Schaafhausen was able to write up a fuller (and still impressive) description of the find. The cranium, he said, was of unusual size, and of a long elliptical form. Obvious at once was the remarkable peculiarity of the prominence of the brow arches, coalescing completely in the middle and forming a bar over the eyes and nose that was separated from the low-rising forehead by a depression. The rather undomed brain-case was still quite capacious, even in its broken form, with a cranial capacity he estimated at about 1033 ml (rather small for a Neanderthal, but damage no doubt accounts for that). He noted, too, the unusual shape of the Neanderthal skull at the rear, with what has come to be called a bun-like bulge in the occipital area. He went on to describe the postcranial bones: the femurs (thigh bones) of unusual thickness and the evident signs of strong musculature; the robust right humerus (upper arm bone) and radius (one of the lower arm bones) and corresponding broken right ulna; the stunted left humerus and left ulna so pathologically deformed that elbow flexure must have been severely restricted; the fragments of pelvis and scapula (shoulder blade); the rib fragments, some of which suggested in their rounded shape an unusually powerful development of the thoracic muscles. The pathological state of the left arm bones left Schaafhausen in no doubt that the Neanderthal individual had suffered some serious injury during life, leading to both abnormal bone growth in places and general stunting of the left arm; he was emphatic that there was no evidence whatsoever of rickets as a cause of the poor condition of the left arm, or – we might add – the bowing seen in the leg bones, which Schaafhausen did not highlight. Interestingly he did note that ‘the greater part of the cartilage is still retained in the bones, which appears, however, to have undergone that transformation into gelatine which has been observed by von Bibra in fossil bones’. It was this situation (together with the varnishing of the bones) that was, nearly 150 years later, to facilitate the genetic determinations on these original Neanderthal bones that have recently promised to settle some of the outstanding controversies over Neanderthal Man’s evolutionary status and relationship to ourselves. It is to be hoped that similar genetic investigation may prove to be possible on some of the bones of other Neanderthal people and prehistoric people in general, to create a wider and firmer picture of the evolution of Homo sapiens as a whole, but it may be that circumstances were especially favourable at the Neanderthal caves and like genetic information may not be so easy to come by elsewhere. Schaafhausen observed, in his paper of 1858 translated into English for the Natural History Review of April 1861, that ‘the bones, which were covered by a deposit of mud not more than four or five feet thick . . . have retained the greatest part of their organic substance’.
Schaafhausen, already aware of the tack that would be taken by scholars who disagreed with him about the Neanderthal bones, was at pains in his paper to make clear his conclusion that the strange form of the skull was not the result of pathology or of injury or of deliberate deformation (as still practised in some savage parts of the world in the nineteenth century), but was rather the natural state of the race represented by the Neanderthal find. He had very little to go on, as he was fully aware, when he came to this conclusion, but he was absolutely right about it. While noting that the ‘remarkable conformation of the forehead . . . gives the skull somewhat the aspect of the large apes’ he also saw traits in the rugged-browed Neanderthal skull that reminded him of features seen ‘at the present time in some of the German races, as for instance in Hesse and the Westerwald’ and concluded that it might ‘fairly be supposed that a conformation of this kind represents the faint vestiges of a primitive type, which is manifested in the most remarkable manner in the Neanderthal cranium, and which must have given the human visage an unusually savage aspect’. In these remarks we see an implicit acceptance of the notions of human descent from ape-like ancestors and of the possibility, at least, that modern populations might still here and there evince physical traits descended in turn from earlier (but human enough) populations represented by individuals like the Neanderthal Man.
Not everyone in the German academic establishment was going to agree with Schaafhausen’s view of the matter. The disagreement began with a colleague of Schaafhausen’s in Bonn University, who noted the curvature of the Neanderthal limb bones and proposed that this bowing had resulted, on top of the rickets which Schaafhausen had explicitly and correctly ruled out, from a lifetime in the saddle (‘typical thigh bones of a man who has ridden horses constantly since his youth’). He concluded that the remains belonged to an unfortunate Cossack (of Mongol descent, presumably to help cover the skull peculiarities) of the Russian army that passed through Germany to fight in France in 1814; wounded, the man had crawled into one of the Feldhof caves to die. The exaggerated state of his brow-ridges was attributed to a habit of frowning to excess. Other opinions saw in the Neanderthal individual: ‘an ancient Dutchman’, ‘undoubtedly a Celt’, ‘a poor hydrocephalic idiot who had lived like an animal in the forest’, even ‘a wild cannibal who had somehow been transported to Europe’. The most formidable opponent of Schaafhausen’s (and Fuhlrott’s) interpretation of the Neanderthal find told Fuhlrott at a scientific convention in Kassel in 1857 that the Neanderthal Man was, after all, a thoroughly pathological specimen, whose brows were the result of injury, whose bowed limbs had been caused by rickets and whose other general divergences from the modern human form could be put down to arthritis deformans. Professor Virchow of Berlin University (one of the greatest biologists of the day) continued with an ingenious, if as we now know unfounded, argument against the attribution of any great antiquity to the Neanderthal Man: since this crippled unfortunate had evidently lived on well into maturity in his diseased and injured state, then he must have enjoyed the benefits of a developed and caring society which, Virchow was sure, could not have existed in the remote past. We shall see that just such care and concern was very likely a feature of Neanderthal society, however different from us physically and mentally these people turn out to have been. Virchow, though a liberal-minded, even radical figure without theological prejudice, was ever an enemy of all ideas of biological evolution (human or in general) and kept up his opposition for the next thirty years, dismissing with ever more contortion every new find of fossil man that came along after Neanderthal as pathological or mistaken. His remarks about the impossibility of a caring society in the remote past do indicate a belief in social if not physical evolution, however.
Neanderthal Man had got off, then, to a start of mixed fortunes in the country of his discovery. He had his supporters as a very ancient and different sort of human being, with a part to play in the evolution of mankind, but had also his detractors who saw in him only a poor freak of whom nothing more would be heard. To establish himself, Neanderthal Man would have to fi
gure in a wider world.
Neanderthal Man Abroad
The work of Fuhlrott and Schaafhausen on the Neanderthal find was not known in Britain until after the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859. Those who were won over by Darwin’s theory were naturally disposed to accept the Neanderthal evidence more readily than they might have been in 1857. The geologist Lyell, who overcame his initial scepticism about evolution by natural selection, visited the Neanderthal site in 1860 – to him we owe the only attempt at an archaeological section of the find spot now available. He brought back casts of the bones to England. By then, Boucher’s finds in the Somme gravels were widely accepted as firm evidence for the remote antiquity of man, especially after the more painstaking work of Rigollot in the 1850s. After fresh explorations, the evidence of the excavations in Devon in the 1820s was reinforced with further clear proof of the presence of humanly-worked flint tools in association with the fossil remains of mammoth, rhino, reindeer, lions, bears and hyenas sealed under unbroken stalagmite; full recognition of this evidence came in 1859.