NEANDERTHAL DISCOVERIES
The discovery of numerous other Neanderthal remains — including two nearly-complete skeletons found with stone-age tools in Belgium in 1886--established that Neanderthals were a bona fide type of ancient hominid rather than modern victims of maladies. But even so, late 19th and early 20th century anthropologists were loathe to accept what newspapers already had taken to calling “Neanderthal Man” as a possible ancestor. One possible reason: Discoveries in Croatia from 1899 to 1905 of Neanderthal remains that were splintered and apparently had been exposed to fire led them to conclude that Neanderthals were cannibals, a legacy that few refined European gentleman-scientists would have been eager to claim as their own.
Scientists’ early conception of Neanderthals also was hindered by errant analysis. The most egregious example was French Anthropologist Marcellin Boule, who published an influential monograph on Neanderthals in the early 1910s. Boule incorrectly reconstructed Neanderthals’ anatomy, giving them a stooping posture, a slouching gait and a protruding, thrust-forward head. He also made assumptions that went far beyond anything he found in the fossil evidence. "It is probable that Neanderthal Man must have possessed only a rudimentary psychic nature, superior certainly to that of the anthropoid apes, but markedly inferior to that of any modern race whatsoever,” Boule concluded. Without doubt he had only the rudiments of articulate speech.” That fit conveniently with the view of Scottish anatomist Arthur Keith, who saw the Neanderthals as a race of primitives who’d been wiped out by “more virile” modern humans, just as European colonists had overwhelmed native peoples in the Americas and Australia.
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