Neandertal Sites

Neandertal sites are found throughout most of Europe, in Western Asia, and in parts of Central Asia. In the early and mid-1900s, anthropologists Franz Weidenreich and AleŠ Hrdlièka proposed that all modern humans went through a Neandertal stage of evolution. Under this model, all Middle Pleistocene hominid fossils that were morphologically intermediate between Homo erectus and anatomically modern humans were referred to as Neandertals. Thus, literature in the mid- and later 20th century may refer to Asian or African Neandertals, but this has generally fallen out of practice.

Neandertals are often thought of as cave dwellers because most sites are discovered in rock shelters and caves. However, it is important to remember that certain biases may be partially responsible for the distribution of Neandertal sites on the landscape. For example, there is a bias toward finding fossils in caves and rock shelters where they are better protected and more likely to be preserved. Moreover, the number of sites discovered in Europe is at least partially a result of European historical interest in (and thus interest in finding evidence for) human evolution.

The first Neandertal recognized as such was found at Feldhofer Cave in the Neander Valley near Dusseldorf, Germany. It is for this site that Neandertals were named (valley = Tal in German). Feldhofer 1 was discovered in 1856, 3 years before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species.Without any evolutionary framework in which to interpret the fossils, they were first believed by Johann Fuhlrott to represent an extinct human race that was replaced by the ancestors of modern Germans. In contrast, the famous biologist Rudolf Virchow believed the Feldhofer specimen was a pathological modern human. Still others believed the bones were the remains of a Cossack from the Napoleon Wars. The original fossils from Feldhofer Cave included a skull cap and a partial postcranial skeleton. Excavations at Feldhofer Cave have been recently reopened, and additional remains of Felhofer 1, together with those of other individuals, have been recovered.

Although Neandertals were named for the Feldhofer site, the Feldhofer specimen was not the first Neandertal discovered. The cranium of a Neandertal child (Engis 2) had been discovered near Engis Village,Belgium, in 1829. Likewise, the cranium of an adult Neandertal from Forbes Quarry, Gibraltar, had been reported in 1848. However, as with the Feldhofer specimens, their evolutionary significance was not appreciated until much later.

The fossil from the site of La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France (discovered in1908), has played an important role in how we view Neandertals. The Neandertal image—that of a hunched over, bent-kneed, awkward-looking caveman—can be traced to Marcellin Boule's inaccurate reconstruction of this fossil published between 1911 and1913. Boule believed that Neandertals played no part in human evolution. Thus, it is no surprise that he would describe Neandertals as intellectually inferior despite this specimen's cranial capacity of more than 1600 cc (well above the modern human average of 1450 cc). However inaccurate, this negative image has been difficult for Neandertals to shed. We now know that La Chapelle-aux-Saints (“Old Man from La Chapelle”) was a severely arthritic old man whose bent posture [Page 1718]was the result of the disease. As such, it was not representative of Neandertals as a whole.

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