Neandertals

Early History

Early interpretations of Neandertals were marred by misrepresentation and misdiagnoses of the nature of the anatomical features seen in the material. In the early years after the Feldhofer discovery, many researchers did not even recognize the antiquity of the material. For example, in 1872, Rudolf Virchow published a report claiming that the Feldhofer individual was simply an early 19th century Mongolian Cossack afflicted by rickets, a view originally proposed by Geheime-Rath Mayer soon after the material was announced. Once the antiquity of the Neandertals was established, researchers began to develop hypotheses regarding who the Neandertals were and what relationship they had to modern human beings.

While many proponents of Darwin's theory of descent with modification were willing or even eager to accept the Neandertal material as evidence of an intermediate in our evolution, the prevailing view quickly became that Neandertals were much too primitive in form to be directly related to modern human beings. This development could be considered an unhappy circumstance, as the more spectacular Neandertal discoveries in France overshadowed the description of the large, fragmentary Krapina sample from Croatia. Furthermore, several important French finds at this time, such as Le Moustier and La Chapelle-aux-Saints in 1908, La Ferassie in 1909,and La Quina in 1911, were published in a sequence that became quite detrimental to the interpretation of Neandertals for years to come. The description of Le Moustier was delayed and incorrectly reconstructed, while La Ferassie was trusted to Marcellin Boule, who was preoccupied with the description of La Chapelle. When Boule published his description of La Chapelle, it overshadowed the La Quina find and quickly became the penultimate description of Neandertal morphology. Unfortunately, La Chapelle was an elderly individual suffering from a variety of ailments, and Boule interpreted the material to mean that Neandertals were bent-knee walking brutes with little intelligence, much closer to apes than modern humans. This view of Neandertals dominated in academic circles until after World War II.

Boule had created the typological characterization of Neandertals based on one of the most atypical Neandertal specimens known: an older individual afflicted by a suite of pathological conditions. While the French Neandertal material created the dominant image of Neandertals, the Krapina assemblage was also available to these early researchers, an assemblage that not only clearly indicated that the anatomy of La Chapelle was not typical of Neandertals, but one that gave a sense of the wide range of variation seen within this population. The lack of the recognition of this variation underlay much of the early work that unequivocally dismissed Neandertals from the ancestry of modern humans.

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