The Neanderthal Mystery

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 floor with pickaxes when they came upon the strange skull and sturdy bones. Setting the skeletal remains aside, they kept digging, never dreaming that their discovery would soon spark confusion, dismay and heated debate that has continued to this day.

Those bones (and others since unearthed as far away as England in the north, Uzbekistan to the east and Israel in the south) are the remains of what have come to be known as the Neanderthals, a primitive people who lived from around 200,000 to 27,000 years ago. And while many misconceptions and mysteries about Neanderthals have been resolved, one question remains unanswered: Were the Neanderthals a branch on the evolutionary tree that withered and died while Homo sapiens -- modern human beings -- continued to evolve? Or were they really ancestors of at least some people living today?

At the time of the Neander Valley find, Charles Darwin had not yet published his famous The Origin of Species, and evolution was still, at best, only a hazy conjecture among a handful of scientists. Indeed, most people then believed that human beings had remained essentially unchanged since creation.

Examining the skullcap, ribs, part of the pelvis and some limb bones taken from the cave, Dr. William King, an Irish geologist, suggested that the fossil might be an extinct form of humanity, a different species. The skull, with its prominent brow ridge, led him to declare that "thoughts and desires which once dwelt within it never soared beyond those of a brute."

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 to the head, Virchow opined.

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 primitive tools and the remnants of extinct animals found near the skeletons. The Neanderthals, they agreed, were ancient. Still, they insisted that, Darwin's controversial new theory notwithstanding, the strange creatures could not possibly be ancestral to exalted human beings like themselves.

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 Marcellin Boule.