Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy

In 1856 Johann Carl Fuhlrott, a schoolteacher, discovered the bones of a hitherto unknown species of human in a cave in the Neander Valley, western Germany. Following the publication of On the Origin of Species just three years later, there was a fierce debate about where the new specimen fit into the Tree of Life. Had Homo sapiens evolved from this strange humanoid or did it belong on an altogether separate branch? Conservative paleontologists working in cahoots with the Catholic Church made a concerted effort to emphasize the differences between the two species. By portraying Neanderthals as only very distantly related to Homo sapiens, they hoped to retain our status as a separate and exceptional species. When the first complete skeleton of a Neanderthal was discovered by three Catholic priests in 1908 in La Chapelle-aux-Saints in southern France—about 300 kilometers west of Chauvet—the Church made sure it ended up in the hands of someone who shared their worldview, Marcellin Boule, director of the Laboratory of Paleontology at Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, reconstructed the specimen so that it looked much more simian than human, with its forward-jutting head, slouching shoulders, hunched spine, bent knees and even opposable toes. Boule’s work was flawed, but it had a profound impact on scientific understanding of Neanderthals for the next half-century and it still informs the popular stereotype of the ape-like cave man.[27]