by Lydia Pyne
Not only are these seven fossils all celebrated discoveries, each fossil illustrates a different kind of fame or notoriety within scientific and public circles. Lucy has become an icon; the Taung Child a folk hero. The Old Man of La Chapelle established the cultural archetype for Neanderthals. The Piltdown Hoax became a cautionary tale about preconceptions in science. The Peking Man fossils from Zhoukoudian took on a dramatic flair of paleo-noir as the fossils were lost and have never been recovered, vanished into legend like the Maltese Falcon. Flo is inexorably linked with her hobbit-infused identity. And the most recent fossil celebrity, Sediba, has embarked on a public relations campaign to become a fossil of serious scientific repute since its publication in 2010. These fossils are vivid examples of how discoveries have been received, remembered, and immortalized and serve as reminders of how our past as a species continues to impact, in astounding ways, our present culture and imagination.
Map of the seven fossil discoveries. (S. Seibert)
These fossils live rich, vibrant lives, even though they are nominally tucked into their vaults at various museums. These seven tell us about our evolutionary ancestry—they give us millions of years worth of details about adaptations, selection pressures, even paleoenvironments—that preceded Homo sapiens. They demonstrate that science is a social and cultural process—how hypotheses are evaluated, how theories change, how technology is an ever changing tool for creating knowledge. As the stories of these fossils are told and retold, adding layer upon layer of cultural meaning, their histories become ever more entwined with our own.
The Old Man of La Chapelle. These pen-and-ink drawings of the Neanderthal were created by Monsieur J. Papoint, under the direction of Marcellin Boule, and printed in Boule’s L’Homme Fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints, 1911.
CHAPTER ONE
THE OLD MAN OF LA CHAPELLE: THE PATRIARCH OF PALEO
On August 3, 1908, a curious skeleton was discovered in south-central France by three French abbés. These abbés, Amédée Bouyssonie, his brother Jean Bouyssonie, and their colleague Louis Bardon, were all experts in prehistoric archaeology and were conducting an archaeological survey of the caves around the small French village of La Chapelle-aux-Saints. Their survey would map and document new Stone Age sites—any artifacts recovered during the excavations had the potential to shed light on early human prehistory.
The Bouyssonies and Bardon began their work in July 1908 and the first cave they surveyed yielded stone tools and fossilized animal bones—artifacts that strongly suggested that the region was a perfect fit for their Paleolithic research agenda. Encouraged by this early success, the prehistorians redoubled their efforts and began excavations in a second bouffia, or cave. In addition to more artifacts and fossils, the archaeologists found something unprecedented in early twentieth-century Paleolithic research: they found a burial pit containing an intact humanlike skeleton. As workers peeled back the layers of dirt around the skeleton, the abbés saw that the body was flexed in a fetal position, knees pulled up to the chest.
Subsequent study of the skeleton in the ensuing years showed that the bones belonged to a man—a toothless old man who’d suffered from osteoarthritis. But the skeleton wasn’t the remains of a very old Homo sapiens. The skeleton was that of a Neanderthal, an extinct species of near-human first discovered in 1856. Although isolated Neanderthal fossils had been turning up for decades in sites across Europe and North Africa, prior to the abbés’ discovery in 1908, no complete Neanderthal skeleton had ever been recovered. Their discovery was quickly nicknamed the Old Man of La Chapelle, and the fossil has shaped, directed, and influenced scientific research as well as public perceptions of Neanderthals for over one hundred years.
—
Fifty years before the discovery of the Old Man, research in paleoanthropology and archaeological prehistory looked very different than it did in 1908, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Both paleoanthropology and prehistoric archaeology were rather newly forming scientific disciplines, focused on humankind’s long evolutionary history. In the mid-nineteenth century, fossil discoveries were interpreted within a framework of natural history, drawing from natural history’s methodology and theoretical framework. Consequently, the mid-nineteenth century was an exciting time for those interested in studying fossils and understanding species change and even extinction. For example, French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck argued for the inheritance of an organism’s acquired characteristics. Charles Lyell popularized Scottish geologist James Hutton’s theory of uniformitarianism in his own 1830–1833 publication of Principles of Geology. In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Botanical, biological, and ethnographic collections were gathered by explorers and amateur naturalists, demonstrating the wide range of life on earth. Museums proliferated, taking the cabinets of curiosities from older generations and creating formal institutions, giving these newly amassed collections of animals, plants, and fossils new life.1
By the end of the nineteenth century, natural history was a more structured intellectual endeavor than it had been for centuries, and all of these new scientific endeavors needed practical grounding from field research. Lyell published geological profiles that showed evidence of glacial movements in the Alps. Darwin bred pigeons as an experiment to gather evidence for his theory of evolution by natural selection. (He later bequeathed all 120 of his pigeon specimens to the Natural History Museum in London in 1867.) The mid-nineteenth century also marked the origin of Neanderthal research, beginning with the discovery of the species in the 1850s. Natural historians interested in the deep time of human past began looking to records of material culture—stone tools and artifacts—in systematic ways; it was the beginnings of what the twentieth century would call methodology for archaeology and paleoanthropology. The stone tools and other artifacts gave substance and data to what new scientific theories—and new disciplines—meant for the longue durée of humanity’s history.
The Neanderthal story begins in August 1856, when limestone quarry workers blasted out the entrance to the Feldhofer grotto in the Neander Valley of west-central Germany. Picking through the rubble, workers found a set of skeletal remains and turned the skull scraps, arm bones, ribs, and part of a pelvis over to one Johann Carl Fuhlrott, an amateur naturalist and local gymnasiat schoolteacher in Elberfeld. (The workers assumed the bones were from an ancient cave bear.) Fuhlrott’s degree in natural sciences from the University of Bonn helped him to appreciate the uniqueness of the materials the workers had given him. Although he quickly recognized that the bones were humanesque (and not ursid), he noted that the bones were unusual. The cranium was extremely thick and differed greatly in shape from that of a human skull. Moreover, the skull case was elongated and the brow ridges above the eyes were almost ridiculously pronounced. Fuhlrott thought that the bones were most likely very old, since they had high mineral deposition on them and their stratigraphic provenience—the location of their discovery in the cave’s sediments—showed that they were not recent additions to the cave.
Fuhlrott’s cursory examination of the bones led him to conclude that he wanted a second, more expert opinion, so he delivered the Neander Valley skeletal remains to famed professor of anatomy Hermann Schaaffhausen at the University of Bonn. Schaaffhausen was impressed by what he called the “primitive” form of the skull and the evidence for its geological antiquity. (Fuhlrott had carefully questioned the quarry workers in order to substantiate his claim that the geological context of the skeletal materials really was old.) According to both Schaaffhausen and Fuhlrott, the bones were legitimately old and definitely humanlike, but still very different from other skeletal remains of Homo sapiens.
In addition to his expertise in human anatomy, Schaaffhausen had the scientific connections to be able to introduce this curious find to a broader natural history community. Fuhlrott and Schaaffhausen publicly announced the discovery and description
of the bones in June 1857 at a Niederrheinische Gesellschaft für Natur-und Heilkunde meeting, convinced that the Lower Rhine Medical and Natural History Society chapter, which met in Bonn, was the perfect opportunity to introduce their studies of the bones to an invested audience. Together, they argued that the bones represented an ancient race of humans that had belonged to the German area. “The human bones from the Neanderthal,” the two wrote, referencing the region of the fossil’s discovery, “exceed all the rest in those peculiarities of conformation which lead to the conclusion of their belonging to a barbarous and savage race.”2
Indeed, Schaaffhausen argued in his presentation to the naturalist group that “sufficient grounds exist for the assumption that man coexisted with the animals found in the diluvium [biblical flood]; and many barbarous races may, before all historical time, have disappeared, together with animals of the ancient world, whilst the races whose organization improved have continued the genus.”3 Schaaffhausen argued that the bones belonged to an extinct race of humans, but he did not specifically argue that they belonged to a separate and distinct fossil species. In recent decades, paleoanthropologist Dr. Ian Tattersall noted, “In hindsight, one can see how tantalizingly close Schaaffhausen came to an evolutionary perspective on his fossils, for he cleverly worked his notion of the mutability of species into his argument.”4 Schaaffhausen published a paper on the Neanderthal fossils in the Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie und wissenschaftliche Medicin in 1858, and in 1859 Fuhlrott published a paper in the Verhandlungen des Naturhistorischen Vereins der preussischen Rheinlande und Westphalens that described the geology of the Neander Valley site and recounted the story of how the bones were discovered. Both men believed the Neanderthal fossils dated from a period when extinct animals such as mammoths and the woolly rhinoceros still lived in Europe, which would make the fossils among the oldest human remains known.
It goes without saying that these fossils generated considerable debate in Germany and abroad. The prominent German anthropologist Rudolf Virchow rejected outright Schaaffhausen’s interpretation of the fossils. Virchow considered the Neander specimen to be a pathological anomaly of a recently deceased human—he thought the anatomical oddities, such as the skull shape and brown ridges, could be explained without invoking the rhetoric of species mutability. Virchow, an antievolutionist who abhorred the idea of species change, was also a dominant figure in German life sciences at the time, so his criticisms carried weight. In addition to Virchow’s skepticism, August Mayer, a colleague of Schaaffhausen’s at the University of Bonn, constructed an even more peculiarly specific account of the Neander specimen’s life history. Mayer argued that the bones belonged to a person who had suffered from rickets and whose constant frowning from pain formed the bony ridges above the eyes. Mayer suggested that Fuhlrott and Schaaffhausen simply had found the remains of a deserter from the Cossack cavalry who had stopped in the Rhine in 1814.5
The Neander Valley skeletal remains gained a more secure footing within the scientific community in 1863 when professor of geology William King of Queen’s College in Galway, Ireland, presented a paper at the 1863 annual meeting of the British Association, known today as the British Science Association. King argued the Neanderthal fossils belonged to an extinct species of early humans, and King went one step further and declared the fossils to represent a new species, Homo neanderthalensis, a species that was distinctly separate from our own, Homo sapiens. (His talk appeared in print the following year.) Even eminent natural historian Thomas Henry Huxley championed the Fuhlrott and Schaaffhausen skull as a member of the Neanderthal species and noted that the skull was “the most pithecoid of known human skulls.”6 (“Pithecoid” here means “apelike.”) Huxley estimated that the cranial piece was of “normal” capacity—in keeping with what might be expected in a human population—and suggested that the Feldhofer skull was much more similar to an Australian Aborigine than to any living ape population. With so much interest swirling around the bones, the Neanderthal species was gaining force and presence in natural history circles because it inspired so many kinds of research questions.
After the specimen from the Neander Valley—designated as Neanderthal 1, the type specimen of the species—created taxonomic validity for Neanderthals, museums across Europe began to reexamine their collections. Several specimens that had previously been declared oddities or aberrations of Homo sapiens were now folded into this new species and were designated as Homo neanderthalensis. As a new “almost-human” fossil species, Neanderthals provided the budding discipline of paleoanthropology with a plethora of fantastic specimens for study. There was a child’s cranium from Engis, Belgium (discovered in 1829–1830), a female cranium from Forbes’ Quarry, Gibraltar (originally discovered in 1848), as well as other skeletal fragments scattered throughout museum collections in Europe. Archaeological excavations to recover more such fossils began in earnest across Europe—particularly in southern France during the first decade of the twentieth century—and these new sites yielded a plethora of Neanderthal fossils. By the time that American Henry Fairfield Osborn, the paleontologist and director of the American Museum of Natural History, embarked on his grand tour of Europe in 1909 to see Europe’s plethora of Paleolithic archaeological sites, dozens of Neanderthal specimens had been comfortably situated in scientific literature.
—
Once Neanderthals had been firmly established as a fossil species, the next challenge was to try to make sense of their place in an evolutionary schema. Where had Neanderthals come from? What had their culture and technologies looked like? And why did they die out? These questions carried an implicit juxtaposition of Neanderthals with modern humans. The questions also contained an implied claim about human evolutionary history: one species, ours, was successful—we survived to the present day—and the other was not. For early-twentieth-century researchers, this meant that there was something about humans—technology, culture, aptitude, some kind of something—that destined humans to “succeed” where Neanderthals had “failed.”
In the decades after Schaaffhausen and Fuhlrott, King, and even naturalists Huxley and Darwin, a significant amount of effort went into evaluating the question of how human or not Neanderthals were. The interest in Neanderthals quickly spread across Europe, drawing out researchers from geology, paleontology, and natural history, to say nothing of prehistory itself. In France, researchers interested in the “antiquity of man” focused on exploring and excavating caves with good potential for Paleolithic materials to tease apart and piece together the narrative of prehistory.
By 1908, this interest in understanding more about Neanderthals—and in excavating Neanderthal archaeological sites—led the abbés Amédée Bouyssonie, Jean Bouyssonie, and Louis Bardon to the sites in the Dordogne region of south-central France, to caves near the small village of La Chapelle-aux-Saints. As prominent prehistorians, the Bouyssonie brothers were familiar with the archaeology of the region, and their survey would explore and excavate the region’s extensive complex of caves, or bouffias as the features were locally called. Photographs of their survey show caves carved out of the region’s gray-white limestone with plants growing in the mottled gray rock, draping themselves over the entrances to the caves. The slopes of the hills are scattered with scrubby foliage—few, if any, trails crisscross the scree slopes, but caves clearly dotted the landscape.7
Photographs of La Chapelle cave prior to excavations, 1908. Printed in Marcellin Boule’s L’Homme Fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints, 1911.
That July, the Bouyssonie brothers, along with Bardon, excavated stone tool artifacts and small pieces of rhinoceros horn and vertebral fragments in the first cave they examined in the La Chapelle area. Encouraged by these initial successes, the three prehistorians turned their attention to a second bouffia. This cave had an unusual geologic mudstone feature—a marl—that ran close to the cave’s entrance, suggesting that the cave was old enough to fit their archaeological interests. Initial excavations of this marled cave y
ielded bone and stone fragments, similar to what they had already uncovered in their first site. However, on August 3, the excavators began to uncover something even more exciting. They peeled back the cave’s sediments to find a humanlike skull. The Bouyssonies and Bardon continued excavations and found the rest of the male skeleton, curled up in a fetal position. Had he died in the cave like that, his body eventually covered over time by the cave’s sediments? Or had he been deliberately buried there? The abbés felt that what they found was, in fact, a burial. In publishing the results of their excavation, Jean Bouyssonie described the body’s context as, “La fosse n’a pas une origine naturelle”—The pit does not have a natural origin.8 This unnatural origin, then, meant that the pit had been deliberately dug and the body purposefully placed in it.
Photograph of La Chapelle cave’s archaeological excavations, 1908, with picnic basket for scale. Printed in Marcellin Boule’s L’Homme Fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints, 1911.
Concerned about looters and trespassers, the archaeologists quickly finished their work excavating the skeleton in the La Chapelle cave. They loaded up the skeletal remains and associated artifacts into a box and carried everything back to the Bouyssonie home in La Raufie, where they began to consider where they ought to send the bones for analysis. The Bouyssonie brothers were experts in artifacts, not in skeletal morphology and anatomical descriptions. Like Johann Fuhlrott fifty years prior, they realized they required the help of an expert in anatomy and taxonomy to make sense of their discovery.
That very night after returning home, August 3, 1908, Jean and Amédée Bouyssonie wrote to two eminent scholars—the renowned French prehistorian Henri Breuil in Paris, as well as Émile Cartailhac in Toulouse—to ask their recommendations for other experts who could provide technical descriptions of the skeleton’s anatomy. Breuil was a powerhouse in French prehistory circles, a specialist in geology, prehistory, and ethnography. Cartailhac was best known for his descriptions of the famous Altamira cave paintings in Spain, descriptions that he had completed with Breuil in 1880. Breuil wrote back and suggested that they contact the prominent geologist and paleontologist Marcellin Boule, director of the prestigious Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris.
