150 years Neanderthal Man, more than just another anniversary
Dr. Michael Hess
University of Duisburg, Germany
When I was asked to write a contribution for the Hatada Website, I was in trouble because there
are so many cultural topics in Germany and in my area where it is worth writing about. I did notwant to write about what is found in the popular travel books about Germany as the "musts" such as
Schloss Neuschwanstein in the South (http://www.neuschwanstein.de), or Heidelberg, the"Oktoberfest" in Munich. Since I live in the north-western part of Germany, in the Rheinland, near
Cologne and Duesseldorf (which houses probably the highest density of Japanese people outside
Japan and where there is the centre of Aikido in Germany), it was here where I decided to look for
an interesting story.
But what might be interesting for the friends of the Hatada-website? There is Beethoven's birthhouse in Bonn, the former capital (http://www.beethoven-haus-bonn.de). Robert Schumann, anotherfamous composer, born in Zwickau, 1810, but he spent many years in Duesseldorf, and recently,
29.07.2006, was the 150th anniversary of his passing away in Bonn-Endenich (Schumann-House,Bonn-Endenich, Sebastianstr. 182); there is Cologne with its mighty Gothic cathedral and its
Roman history (http://wdr.de/domcam), there is Aachen (or Aix-la-Chapelle as the French call it;
http://www.aachen-tourist.de), in the corner where Belgium and the Netherlands meet Germany,
most popular place of Charles the Great around the year 800, hence in some sense a first German
capital (only in 1871 Berlin became the first "official" capital of Germany) with its marvellous
cathedral consisting of the octogonal Romanic chapel as core (built by Charles the Great) and thelater attached Gothic chorus which is Europe's largest "glass house" with its huge coloured windows.
Aachen is also the home of the Rheinisch-Westfaelische Technische Hochschule, the well-known
RWTH (http://www.rwth-aachen.de), where I have studied and where famous scientists andengineers like Theodor von Karman (engineer), Helmut Zahn (protein chemist) or Josef Meixner(physicist) were professors. The RWTH has the sigullum of Charles the Great as its coat of arms.
There are the Romans in Germany, who have left an impressive heritage along the river Rhein(English: Rhine) in names of cities like Koblenz (Confluentes = where the rivers Mosel and Rhein
merge), Cologne (Colonia Agrippinensis), Neuss (Novesium) opposite of Duesseldorf, or Xanten(Colonia Ulpia Traiana) (http://www.xanten.de; http://www.apx.lvr.de), a settlement on the lower
Rhine from which the Roman General Publius Quinctilius Varus had set out with three legions (theXVII, XVIII, and the XIX, a total of about 20,000 men) from the local military camp Castra Veterain the year 9 to be annihilated with all his troops by Arminius in the battle of the Teutoburger forest(4 days and 3 nights) that has recently be localised at Bramsche-Kalkriese near Osnabrueck.
There are unique masterpieces of engineering very close to my hometown, Wuppertal: theMuengstener Bridge (http://www.muengstener-bruecke.de), an early (1897) iron railway bridge 107
meters high and 480 m wide, constructed like the Tour Eiffel, the famous Schwebebahn (hangingtrain or suspending train, see: http://www.schwebebahn.de or http://home.telebel.de/pebosba, or
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuppertaler.schwebebahn) that was built around the year 1900 that
had only three accidents (none of them caused by the technique or the construction). One of theaccidents was caused 21st May 1950 by a baby-elephant, Tuffi by name, who jumped out of thetrain and fell down into the river Wupper – a true story! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuffi). So
what to do? Finally, I decided to write about a famous inhabitant of this area, well-known all over
the world, the first true European: Neanderthal man (homo neanderthalensis). A relative but
obviously not a predecessor of the modern man (homo sapiens sapiens). Neanderthal man was first
identified exactly 150 years ago, 1856, by a high school teacher from Wuppertal (Wuppertal was atthat time split into two villages, Elberfeld and Barmen). In fact, parts of the skeleton of this species
had been already found in Engis, Belgium, 1829 or 1830, and in Gibraltar 1848. In the year 1863
the name homo neanderthalensis was created by William King in a lecture on a meeting of theBritish Association for the Advancement of Science. After that lecture the zoologist Busk1

remembered the existence of the skull that had beenfound in Gibraltar and it was shown that the bones
belonged to the same type of species.
Neandertal is a valley about 10 km east of
Duesseldorf named after the 17th century poet
Joachim Neander who liked this lovely valley verymuch.
So, it became Neander's Tal. "Tal" means"valley" and one might note that the scientific nameis (usually) written with "th". The reason is thataround the year 1900 there was a reform of German
orthography and many words written with "th" likeThurm (tower), Thuere (door) lost their "h".
Interestingly not the word Thron (= throne). The
reason is that at that time Germany had an Emperor,William II, and he did not want to sit on a throne
without "h", so it remaind in place by higher order.
However, if you want to visit that site today and thenice museum there, you have to look for
Figure 1: The bones of the historic"Neandertal"-without "h". In "neanderthal man" ithomo neanderthalensis in the Museum inremained by scientific consequence or tradition.
The Neandertal in former times was a lovely the Neandertal, Germany
valley with forests, meadows and a creek much
loved by artist who came from the nearby Duesseldorf to paint the landscape-it was the romantic
age of the 19th century. The name of the creek is "Duessel" and consequently the name of thevillage at the statuary of the creek with the Rhine was called Duesseldorf, no longer a "Dorf" (=village) these days. However, this area east of
Duesseldorf is rich in limestone because there is a
Devonian coral reef, 400 million years old, and thelimestone was – and is – very popular in building
trade, so there was a stone quarry. At a site called
Kleine Feldhofer Grotte (cave) some quarry workers
found weird bones and thought they might belong to abear or – the Napoleon War was not long ago – they
were bones of some rheumatic soldier of the beaten
Napoleon army. It was C. Fuhlrott, the high school
teacher who immediately realised the importance ofthe bones, the calotte of a skull and some other bones,
see fig. 1. A street in Wuppertal is named afterFuhlrott.
The bones were not found in situ – means they
were not found in their natural, undisturbed position,
therefore, an exact dating of the remains was not yet
accomplished. The age is assumed to be 40,000 to
100,000 years (neopleistocean, Weichsel-glacial). The
huge limestone rock that housed the cave where theFigure 2: View of the site wherebones were found is long gone – completely gone.
the Feldhofer Grotte was, bearing
The original site is now a meadow with marks and northwest. Imagine a huge rockinformation one can obtain from tables and earphone in the centre of the picture withthat can be borrowed at the near-by Neandertal the cave about 20 m above ground level.
Museum. Fig. 2 and 3 show how the original site
looks today. Geographical coordinates: 51°13'38,93''2

North, 6°56'43,22''East.
Imagine a huge rock with thecave entrance in about 20 mheight above the present groundlevel. So, the original site isreally gone. The more surprising
is it that a recent careful revisionof the area (1998) resulted in thediscovery of the (lost) original
location and the identification ofthe sites that were called "Kleine
Feldhofer Grotte" and "Feldhofer
Kirche"early in the 19th century.
The two archeologists Juergen
Tissen and Ralf Schmitz wereeven able to identify the rubble Figure 3: View of the site of the Feldhofer Grotte bearing
from these sites and detected southeast. The site is marked by the red-and-white sticks.
some missing parts of the historical 1856 discovery: 20 parts including a molar, ribs, vertebrae, toebones. They even found a yen-sized bone splinter that fits exactly into the 1856 left knee joint.
There is also hope that some new stone artefacts from the site will provide additional information
about the age of the skeleton.
In those days of Neanderthal man, the lovely valley must have looked entirely different, like atundra with the ice of the glaciers only a few hundred or even less kilometres to the north. About
20,000 years ago the glaciers reached their most southern position about the latitude of Essen, 50
km to the north. On the left (western) bank of the Rhine one can still see the left-overs of thisglacial: the terminal moraines between Xanten and Sonsbeck. These were the times when the riverThames was a tributary stream of the Rhine, large
parts of what is now the North Sea were dry land andthe British Islands were integral part of the continentthat could be reached without wetting the feet.
Who was homo neanderthalensis? There is noevidence that he/she was our ancestor. Rather acousin, a branch of the tree of evolution that was anoffspring (about 400,000 years ago) from homoergaster (homo erectus) who moved into Europe fromAfrica. Homo neanderthalensis, however, is noAfrican. He is European, some relicts were found in
the Near East. He was the only human (andhumanoid) inhabitant of Europe until modern man –the Cro-Magnon type - arrived in Europe from Africa
about 40,000 years ago. The "classical" Neanderthalman is know since about 90,000 years ago and hecoexisted with the Cro-magnon (homo sapiens) inEurope for about 10,000 years before he disappeared
for still unknown reasons about 30,000 years back.
Neanderthal man was more compact and bulky
compared with modern man, reconstructions may Figure 4: Diorama of a camp of homoprovide an idea how they might have looked like, and neanderthalensis with the bodies shaped andmodern computer-assisted face reconstruction is the faces according to the most recent
surprising accurate, see fig. 4.
knowledge and computer-assisted modellingThis new picture of Neanderthal man is much techniques. The model is displayed in thedifferent from the rude, almost pre-hominide ideas of Neandertal Museum.
319th century artists who created sculptures
like the one in fig. 5.
Today
weknowthathomoneandertalensis was different from us,
however a very close relative who had
ideas about an afterlife, who showed social
behaviour, was skilled in creating stone aswell as bone tools and even small piecesof decoration were occasionally found, but
he appears not to have taken part in theartistic explosion that has led to themagnificent paintings of the Magdalenien Figure. 5: The real homo neanderthalensis was certainlyand earlier, see for example the cave of far from this crude sculpture. The helically woundLascaux
orChauvet architecture of the Neandertal Museum is visible in the(http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/ background. The architecture is supposed to reflect thelascaux/en/
resp.: spiral of time that the visitor follows inside this snail
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/c -shell shaped building.
hauvet/en/). However, we do not reallyknow "which was the egg and which thehen" and why these things have happened.
Neanderthal man stands for the period of
the Acheuleen and Mousterien when in thestyle of the stone tools some aesthetic
understanding is obvious. Also different
natural colours were used and occasionallysmall pieces of art were found. It appears to
be almost sure that he was able to speak, tocommunicate that is without doubt. In asense he was a modern human being. Maybe
we would not identify one standing next to Figure 6: Face to face with 30,000 years or more
us - modern dressed - in a metro train inParis. It might be a good idea to visit the original site, in the evening of a day in autumn, when there
is no-one else. It will always be a special place there, even if it looks completely different today. Itis also worth to visit the Neandertal Museum (http://www.neanderthal.de) and dive into that spiralof time that it is, from the idea and also from the architectonic presentation. Where do we comefrom, fig.6, who was the person whose bones we are looking at and what is our destination, fig.7?
P.S.: Just a few days ago (August 10,2006), archeologists have identified
an about 120,000 years old(micoquienne) neanderthalian campwith the ground-plan of a hut near
Cologne in a brown-coal open-cast.
Story by Michael Hess(August 20, 2006)

Figure 7: It was a long way to go…
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