Fossil Man.
Ignorance and prejudice combined to assert that man was created a few thousand years ago in a state of physical perfection. The possibility of the discovery of fossil man was therefore inconceivable to most people, and those earlier writers who entertained the idea were generally inclined to deny it. Cuvier, limiting the age of the earth to the orthodox 6,000 years, had stated that fossil bones of man did not exist. Moreover, up to the time of his death (1832) nothing had been found to disturb this generally received opinion.
More than a hundred years before (1726) Professor Scheuchzer, of Zürich, had discovered his famous “Homo diluvii testis”—“Man, witness of the Flood”—and had described it as a “rare relic of the accursed race of the primitive world,” exclaiming piously: “Melancholy skeleton of an old sinner, convert the hearts of modern reprobates!” His fossil was proved later to be that of a gigantic salamander, and fossil man was allowed to sleep for more than a century.
When the question was again raised, in the middle of the nineteenth century, evidence of human remains which had been hitherto disregarded assumed a new importance, and earlier finds were re-examined.
Cannstadt. Neanderthal.
First there was the Cannstadt cranium, found in 1700 by Duke Eberhard of Würtemberg, which remained undescribed for 135 years in the Stuttgart Museum. Later it was claimed as belonging to the prehistoric “race,” proofs of whose existence were so rapidly accumulating. In 1856 a fresh stimulus was given by the discovery of a cranium and some other remains in the Feldhofen Cave, at the entrance to a small ravine called Neanderthal, on the right bank of the river Düssel, in Rhenish Prussia.
This was the first discovery of remains of palæolithic man to receive serious attention. The skeleton was embedded in a hard, consolidated loam, but unfortunately was badly damaged by the workmen before it was extricated. By the intervention of Fuhlrott, the thigh bones, the upper bone of each arm, shoulder-blade, collar-bone, some fragments of ribs and the cranium, were rescued, and are now in the Rheinische-Antiquitäts’ Museum at Bonn. When the remains were first exhibited by their discoverer at Bonn, doubts were freely expressed as to their human character. Virchow pronounced his opinion that the cranium was diseased; in the long controversy which raged over this skull his wide pathological experience, his distrust of merely morphological considerations, his agnostic position with regard to the origin of species in general and of man in particular, led him, perhaps, to propound this extreme view. Broca declared it to be normal. Huxley recognised the skull as human, but declared it to be the most ape-like ever discovered; and he placed it below the Australian in type.
No absolute reliance could, however, be placed on the evidence of a single skull, and an imperfect one at that; but later discoveries served in the main to confirm Huxley’s opinion.
Spy.
Another important find was that of two crania and other skeletal remains discovered in 1886 at Spy, in the Namur district, Belgium, by de Puydt and Lohest,[[51]] with an associated fauna which included the woolly rhinoceros, mammoth, cave bear, hyæna, etc., five out of the nine species being extinct.