Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

by Peter Watson

All that began to change in 1856 when workers started clearing out a small cave in the side of the Neander valley (Neander Thal in German) through which the river Düssel flows into the Rhine. There, a skull was found, buried beneath more than a metre of mud, together with some other bones. The workmen who found the bones passed them to a local friend who, they felt, was educated enough to make something of them, and he passed them on to Hermann Schaaffhausen, professor of anatomy at Bonn University. Schaaffhausen identified the remains as the top part of a skull, two thigh-bones, parts of a left arm, part of a pelvis, and other smaller remains. In the paper he subsequently wrote on the discovery, Schaaffhausen drew attention to the thickness of the bones, the large size of the scars left by the muscles that were attached to them, the pronounced ridges above the eyes, and a low, narrow forehead. Importantly, Schaaffhausen concluded that the bones were not deformed, either because of where they had been kept over the years, or because of some pathological process. ‘Sufficient grounds exist,’ he wrote, ‘for the assumption that man coexisted with the animals found in the diluvium; and many a barbarous race may, before all historical time, have disappeared, together with animals of the ancient world, whilst the races whose organisation is improved have continued the genus.’