Neanderthal 1: The 1856 Feldhofer Cave Find in Germany

Neanderthal 1 is the partial skeleton found in August 1856 in the Feldhofer Cave in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf, Germany. Roughly 40,000 years old, it was the first fossil recognised as belonging to an extinct kind of human, and it gave its name to the Neanderthals. The find arrived three years before Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and sparked one of the first public debates about human ancestry.

The quarry discovery

In the 19th century the Neander Valley, a gorge of the Düssel river, was being quarried for limestone. In August 1856 workers clearing clay from a small cave high in the gorge wall, the Kleine Feldhofer Grotte, threw out a number of bones. The quarry owners thought they might belong to a cave bear and passed them to Johann Carl Fuhlrott, a schoolteacher and naturalist in nearby Elberfeld.

What survived was a thick skullcap with a strikingly heavy brow ridge, both thigh bones, parts of the arms, part of the pelvis and some ribs. Fuhlrott recognised that the bones were human but unlike any living people. He consulted Hermann Schaaffhausen, professor of anatomy at the University of Bonn, and the two presented the find to scientific societies in 1857, arguing that it came from an ancient, primitive human population.

A fierce debate

The interpretation was hotly contested. Some critics argued that the bones belonged to a modern person deformed by disease. The anatomist August Mayer suggested they came from a Cossack soldier who had died during the campaigns of 1814. Later, the influential pathologist Rudolf Virchow argued in 1872 that the odd features resulted from conditions such as rickets and arthritis, and his authority delayed acceptance of the find in Germany.

In Britain, Thomas Henry Huxley discussed the skull in Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863). He judged it the most ape-like human skull he knew but still regarded it as within the range of Homo sapiens. The Irish-born geologist William King went further. In a paper read in 1863 and published in 1864, he proposed that the bones represented a separate species, which he named Homo neanderthalensis. It was the first fossil human species to receive a formal name.

Earlier finds and growing evidence

Neanderthal fossils had in fact been found before 1856. A child’s skull was found at Engis in Belgium in 1829–1830, and an adult skull at Forbes’ Quarry in Gibraltar in 1848, but neither was understood at the time. Only after the Feldhofer find were they recognised as Neanderthals.

Further discoveries, notably at Spy in Belgium in 1886 and at La Chapelle-aux-Saints in France in 1908, confirmed that the Feldhofer bones belonged to a real ancient population rather than a diseased individual.

Rediscovery and ancient DNA

The cave itself was destroyed by quarrying, and its exact location was forgotten. In 1997 and 2000 the archaeologists Ralf Schmitz and Jürgen Thissen used old maps and records to locate the spoil from the 1856 clearance. Sieving it, they recovered stone tools and dozens of human bone fragments. Some pieces fitted directly onto the original skeleton, and others came from a second, more lightly built individual.

Radiocarbon dating of the bones gave ages of about 40,000 years. In 1997 a team including Matthias Krings and Svante Pääbo extracted mitochondrial DNA from the upper arm bone of Neanderthal 1. It was the first Neanderthal DNA ever sequenced, and it showed that Neanderthals were genetically distinct from living humans. That work led eventually to the full genome studies that revealed Neanderthal interbreeding with modern humans.

The skeleton and its owner

The surviving bones belonged to an adult, generally thought to be male. The skullcap is long and low, with a sloping forehead and a heavy, continuous brow ridge, features that immediately struck early observers as unusual. The limb bones are thick and strongly curved, with large joint surfaces, typical of the robust Neanderthal build.

The bones also record injuries. The left elbow shows signs of an old fracture that healed poorly, probably limiting the use of that arm, and there are traces of other healed injuries. Such evidence, found in many Neanderthal skeletons, suggests a physically demanding life. The original bones are kept today at the LVR-LandesMuseum in Bonn, while the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann, opened in 1996 near the find spot, presents the story of the discovery and of Neanderthal life.

Timeline

• c. 40,000 years ago: The Feldhofer individual dies in the Neander Valley.
• 1856, August: Quarry workers find the bones in the Kleine Feldhofer Grotte.
• 1857: Johann Carl Fuhlrott and Hermann Schaaffhausen present the find.
• 1863: Thomas Henry Huxley discusses the skull in Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature.
• 1864: William King publishes the name Homo neanderthalensis.
• 1872: Rudolf Virchow argues the bones are those of a diseased modern human.
• 1997: The first Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA is sequenced from Neanderthal 1, and the spoil heaps are relocated.
• 2000: Further excavation recovers fragments that fit the original skeleton.

Why it matters

The Feldhofer find gave science its first named extinct human and the Neanderthals their name. It forced Victorian scholars to consider that other kinds of humans had once lived, and more than a century later the same bones yielded the first ancient human DNA.