The most brutal of human skulls: measuring and knowing the first Neanderthal

Abstract

A fossilized skeleton discovered in 1856 presented naturalists with a unique challenge. The strange, human-looking bones of the first recognized Neanderthal confronted naturalists with a new type of object for which they had no readily available interpretive framework. This paper explores the techniques and approaches used to understand these bones in the years immediately following the discovery, in particular 1856-1864. Historians have previously suggested that interpretations and debates about Neanderthals hinged primarily on social, political and cultural ideologies. In this paper, I will argue that much of the scientific controversy surrounding the first recognized Neanderthal centred on questions of methodology and practice, and will demonstrate this through an exploration of the tools and approaches naturalists utilized in their examinations of the fossils. This will contribute to a growing historical recognition of the complex exchange between disciplines including geology, archaeology and comparative anatomy in the early study of fossil hominins, and provide a future framework for histories of Neanderthal debates in the twentieth century.

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