Word: neanderthalers
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At first the German workmen thought they had found the remains of an extinct cave bear. Quarrying for limestone on a summer day in 1856, they had blasted open a small cave on the side of a gorge called Neanderthal (Neander Valley), near Dusseldorf, and were digging up the cave...
But most scientists of the time disputed even the Neanderthal man's antiquity. Rudolf Virchow, a respected German anatomist, pronounced the caveman to be a modern Homo sapiens, whose deformations were caused by rickets in childhood and arthritis later in life. And his flattened skull? He had suffered powerful blows...
Virchow's views were widely accepted until 1886, when two more Neanderthal skeletons were discovered in a cave in the Spy region of Belgium. While Virchow claimed that these too were the remains of diseased modern humans, other scientists regarded such a coincidence as unlikely; they were more impressed by...
Then, in the early 1900s, large numbers of Neanderthal skeletons were discovered, mainly in the Dordogne region of southern France. With these specimens in hand, scientists felt that they could better describe the physical appearance of a Neanderthal man, and the task of reconstructing one fell to noted French paleontologist...
Apparently burdened by preconceptions and the prevailing bias against the notion of Neanderthal ancestors, Boule concluded that a Neanderthal had prehensile feet, could not fully extend his legs, and thrust his head awkwardly forward because his spine prevented him from standing upright. In his scientific papers, Boule described the "brutish...