The Neanderthals: Who Were They and How did They Live

By Michael James

In this book you will find:

 

1 THE DISCOVERY OF THE NEANDERTHALS

2 WHO WERE THE NEANDERTHALS AND HOW DID THEY LIVE?

3 THE MOUSTERIAN

4 NEANDERTHAL BURIALS

5 WHY DID THE NEANDERTHALS DISAPPEAR?

6 THE CONTACT BETWEEN NEANDERTHALS AND SAPIENS 

7 THE LAST NEANDERTHALS 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael James
• Release date: Feb 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201362348

Michael James

Michael James is a father of three who creates stories for his children to treasure and others to enjoy. His writing draws upon his travels, experiences of the world from yesteryear… and now family life too. His stories demonstrate that during times of adversity being creative and fun is a positive route to take.

Book preview

1 THE DISCOVERY OF THE NEANDERTHALS

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Neanderthal man was the first hominid fossil species to be identified, thus revolutionizing the scientific world. However, it took several years from the first findings until it was recognized as a different species of hominid.

In 1830 a Neanderthal skull was found in Engis, Belgium, belonging to a child of about 2 or 3 years old, but at that time this species was not yet known.

A few years later, in 1848, another Neanderthal skull was discovered in a quarry in Gibraltar, but it was not until 1856 when a skeleton appeared by chance in the Feldhofer cave (near Düsseldorf), in the valley of the Düssel River, that this new species of hominid was identified.

In 1856, workers at a quarry in the area found ribs, several bones of the upper and lower extremities, an iliac bone and part of a skull. The workers quickly called Professor Johann Karl Fuhlrott, who considered it to be an antediluvian species.

From this moment on, a new scientific discipline, human paleontology, emerged.

Unfortunately, the Feldhofer limestone cave was to be destroyed for the extraction of stone, and at the beginning of the 20th century it was not known where its original location had been. At the end of the century, a project was launched to locate the cave. In 1997, 24 bone fragments were recovered, one of which belonged to the same individual found in 1856 and served to identify the species. Even years later they managed to sequence the Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA from two bone samples.

After the first inspection made by Fuhlrott, he took them to the anatomist H. Schaaffhausen, who published a study in which he attributed the remains to a member of an ancient tribe that would have occupied Germany before the modern inhabitants.

At first, the problem posed by those bones was two fold:

To seek an explanation for the robust morphology of the extremities and the upper part of the skull of the bones found in the renowned Neander Valley.

The age of the remains and whether they were prehistoric or not.

Around this time Ch. Darwin published his famous work The Origin of Species contributing to the open debate about the discovery of these bones. Although Feldhofer's skeleton was much discussed, already in 1864 in a meeting of the British Association the British geologist William King defended that it would be an extinct human species and proposed to give it the name of Homo Neandertalensis.

However, there were still people who denied an evolutionary conception of the human species, especially in Germany, where different theories about the interpretation of the bones in the Feldhofer cave appeared. Perhaps the most curious one was that the bones belonged to a Mongolian Cossack, even according to the politician and doctor Rudolf Virchow, considered by some as the father of modern pathology, it was a dead man who had died recently, who suffered from diseases such as rickets and osteomalacia and who would possibly live in a cave as a hermit.

Seven years later, T. H. Huxley, a biologist who followed Darwin's theories, carried out a study on Neanderthal bones where he defended that the remains resembled apes and that they belonged to an ancient human being. This study shook the foundations of the Church of England,

It was in 1886, with the discovery of some fossils in Spy, Belgium, in clear association with tools of