Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

At this time, most of the scientists considering the question of human antiquity believed that Europe had once been inhabited by a roundheaded primitive race who used tools of stone and bronze. This race had later been replaced by an invading longheaded race who knew how to use iron. The two races were not, however, regarded as being linked by evolution. In 1857, Professor Schaaffhausen delivered reports to scientific gatherings in Germany, calling the newly discovered Neanderthal man a representative of a “barbarous aboriginal race,” perhaps descended from the wildmen of northwestern Europe mentioned in the works of various Roman authors such as Virgil and Ovid. Schaffhausen called special attention to the Neanderthal skull’s primitive features—its thick bone structure and its pronounced brow ridges—as evidence of its antiquity and difference from the modern racial type. Others suggested it was simply the skull of a modern man, heavily deformed by disease. And there the matter rested until 1859, when Darwin published The Origin of Species, setting off intense speculation about humanity’s possible descent from more primitive apelike creatures.

The Neanderthal discovery was then no longer a topic for discussion only among the members of the Natural History Society of the Prussian Rhineland and Westphalia. The heavyweights of European science moved in to pass judgement. Charles Lyell, then recognized as the world’s preeminent geologist, came to Germany and personally investigated both the fossils and the cave in which they had been found. He felt nothing conclusive could be deduced from the Neanderthal skeleton. For one thing it was “too isolated and exceptional” (Lyell 1863, p. 375). How could generalizations about human prehistory be drawn from just one set of bones which happened to have some “abnormal and ape-like” features? Lyell also felt that its age was “too uncertain.” The unstratified cave deposits in which it had been found could not be assigned a place in the sequence of geological periods. Accompanying animal fossils might have helped establish the age of the Neanderthal man, but none had been found.

Many scientists, especially those opposed to evolutionary doctrines, thought the skeleton was that of a pathologically deformed individual of the recent era. The German anatomist Rudolf Virchow, for example, believed the crude features of the Neanderthal specimen could be explained by deformities resulting from rickets and arthritis. Thirty years after first expressing this opinion in 1857, Virchow still held it, and also continued to dismiss the idea that the Neanderthal bones represented a stage in human evolution from lower species. “The idea that men arose from animals,” said Virchow, “is entirely unacceptable in my view, for if such transitional men had lived there would be evidence of it, and such evidence does not exist. The creature preliminary to man has just not been found” (Wendt 1972, pp. 57–58).

A British scientist argued that the “skull belonged to some poor idiotic hermit whose remains were found in the cave where he died” (Goodman 1982, p. 75). Dr. F. Mayer, an anatomist at Bonn University suggested, like Virchow, that the Neanderthal man’s bent leg bones had been caused by childhood rickets, or perhaps many years of horse riding. In 1814, Cossack cavalry had moved through the area in pursuit of napoleon’s army. Was the Neanderthal man a wounded Cossack who had crawled into the cave and died? Mayer saw this as a distinct possibility. But Thomas Huxley, writing in Natural History Review (1864), asked how a dying soldier got in a cave 60 feet up a steep valley wall and buried himself. And where was his uniform?

An old skull dug up at Forbe’s Quarry, during the building of fortifications at Gibraltar in 1848, entered the discussion. on investigation, the fossil skull had turned out to be quite similar to the Feldhofer cave specimen, prompting George Busk, professor of anatomy at the Royal college of surgeons, to write in 1863: “the Gibraltar skull adds immensely to the scientific value of the Neanderthal specimen, showing that the latter does not represent . . . a mere individual peculiarity, but that it may have been characteristic of a race extending from the Rhine to the Pillars of Hercules. . . . Even Professor Mayer will hardly suppose a rickety Cossack engaged in the campaign of 1814 had crept into a sealed fissure in the Rock of Gibraltar” (Goodman 1982, p. 77).