The Neander Valley in brief
The Neander valley, or Neandertal in modern German, is a stretch of the small Düssel river valley, east of Düsseldorf in western Germany. It was named after Joachim Neander, a 17th-century pastor and hymn writer who liked to walk there. In the 19th century its limestone cliffs were quarried, and in 1856 workers found bones in a small cave called the Feldhofer Grotte. They became the first widely recognised fossils of an extinct kind of human.
The 1856 discovery
In August 1856 workers clearing mud from the cave found a skullcap, thigh bones, parts of arms, a pelvis and some ribs. They thought it was a bear and kept some of the bones. The bones were passed on to Johann Carl Fuhlrott, a local schoolteacher and amateur naturalist, who realised that they were unusual: the skull was long and low, with a heavy brow ridge. With Hermann Schaaffhausen, an anatomist at the University of Bonn, he announced in 1857 that the bones came from an ancient and different kind of human.
The reaction was mixed. Some experts argued that the bones were of a modern man with a deformity, or of a Mongolian Cossack soldier from the Napoleonic wars. In 1864 the geologist William King gave the species its scientific name, Homo neanderthalensis, which acknowledged that the creature was a distinct species. The spelling Thal (valley) in the species name stayed, even though modern German spells the valley Tal.
Finding the cave again
The cave was later destroyed by quarrying, and its exact location was forgotten. In 1997 the archaeologists Ralf Schmitz and Jürgen Thissen traced it from old records and photos and went through the old rubble heaps. They found more Neanderthal bones, including pieces that fit the original skeleton, together with stone tools. That same year Matthias Krings and Svante Pääbo published a short stretch of mitochondrial DNA from the original arm bone, the first genetic material taken from a Neanderthal, which showed that Neanderthals were genetically different from modern humans.
Radiocarbon dates show that the Feldhofer bones are about 40,000 years old.
Why it matters
The Neander Valley find gave the world its first look at an extinct human, just before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859. It started a debate that is still going on about how similar to us the Neanderthals were. Older finds, in Belgium (1829) and Gibraltar (1848), had been overlooked, but it was the Neander Valley skeleton that people accepted as a new kind of human.
Visiting
The Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann stands near the place where the cave was. It opened in 1996 and has exhibits on human evolution and the life of Neanderthals, with a path to the site of the cave and the “Stone Age workshop”. The original bones are held by the LVR-LandesMuseum in Bonn. See also Neanderthals.
Sources
- Schaaffhausen, H. (1858). Zur Kenntniss der ältesten Rassenschädel. Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie und wissenschaftliche Medicin: 453 to 478.
- Krings, M. and others (1997). Neandertal DNA sequences and the origin of modern humans. Cell 90: 19 to 30.
- Schmitz, R. W. and others (2002). The Neandertal type site revisited: interdisciplinary investigations of skeletal remains from the Neander Valley, Germany. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99: 13342 to 13347.
- Neanderthal Museum, Mettmann. neanderthal.de.