Neanderthals: The Womb Of Caves

Recent discoveries indicate that Neanderthals may have had a rich inner life, including symbolic thought. Indeed, they may have been the progenitors of human religions.

- Aravindan Neelakandan

THE YEAR WAS 1856, three years before the publishing of The Origin of Species of Charles Darwin. In Germany, in a cave in a valley east of the river Rhine, some quarry workers discovered piles of stones which resembled human bones. Most of them were thrown away, but a few reached the hands of naturalists. They found them to be ancient and had remarkable as well as consistent differences from human skeletons. The bones remained a mystery and a controversy. Respected scientists kept a safe distance from them. Rudolph Virchow, one of the greatest biologists of his time, considered them to be merely human bones deformed by rickets. Soon similar bones and fossils were found in different parts of Europe.

The remains now termed “Feldhofer fossil of Neander valley” were studied by the fiery evolutionist Thomas Huxley, though Darwin himself maintained silence. Huxley decided that the fossils belonged to a “lower human species”. In 1863, William King, a professor of Geology at Queen’s University in Ireland, studied the fossils, though not the original fossils but the casts made of them. He decided that they belonged to altogether a new species—Homo neanderthelensis. A year later, he would think that it belonged to a lesser human ape species.

In popular perception, an image emerged from the Neanderthal debates in academic citadels. Neanderthals were viewed as a brutish, animal-like, not-so-intelligent group, either an evolutionary failure or a fleeting transition before the emergence of humans. They became part of jokes about cavemen and in popular usage a reference to the uncivilised.