The most brutal of human skulls: measuring and knowing the first Neanderthal PAIGE MADISON* Abstract. A fossilized skeleton discovered in 1856 presented naturalists with a unique chal- lenge. The strange, human-looking bones of the first recognized Neanderthal confronted natur- alists with a new type of object for which they had no readily available interpretive framework. This paper explores the techniques and approaches used to understand these bones in the years immediately following the discovery, in particular 1856–1864. Historians have previously sug- gested that interpretations and debates about Neanderthals hinged primarily on social, political and cultural ideologies. In this paper, I will argue that much of the scientific controversy sur- rounding the first recognized Neanderthal centred on questions of methodology and practice, and will demonstrate this through an exploration of the tools and approaches naturalists uti- lized in their examinations of the fossils. This will contribute to a growing historical recognition of the complex exchange between disciplines including geology, archaeology and comparative anatomy in the early study of fossil hominins, and provide a future framework for histories of Neanderthal debates in the twentieth century. Introduction: discovery in the Neander valley In August 1856, during a routine workday in a German limestone quarry, a fossilized skeleton was shovelled out of a cave mouth, and sent tumbling down a steep cliff, landing on the valley floor below. 1 Though few would have guessed this on the day of the discovery, the skeleton would later become the first scientifically recognized Neanderthal, and the focus of intense scientific interest. 2 From the roughly human- sized partial skull that survived the fall to its accompanying limb and rib bones, it became clear that there was something distinctly different about this human. Several aspects of the anatomy of the strange fossil skull and skeleton required explanation, * Arizona State University, PO Box 874601, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA. Email: pamadiso@asu.edu. I would like to thank Jane Maienschein and Amanda Rees for their guidance and invaluable suggestions on this paper. I am also grateful for the extraordinarily helpful feedback from William Kimbel and Michael Reidy on various stages of this project. Lastly, thank you everyone at the Centre of Biology and Society for supporting this research in countless ways. 1 Ralf W. Schmitz, David Serre, Georges Bonani, Susanne Feine, Felix Hillgruber, Heike Krainitzki, Svante Pääbo and Fred H. Smith, ‘The type site revisited: interdisciplinary investigations of skeletal remains from the Neander valley, Germany’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2002) 99, pp. 1342–1347. 2 Historians who have discussed the Neanderthal include Peter J. Bowler, Theories of Human Evolution: A Century of Debate, 1844–1944, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, pp. 33–34; Richard Delisle, Debating Humankind’s Place in Nature, 1860–2000: The Nature of Paleoanthropology, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007, pp. 70–84; Ian Tattersall, The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We Think We Know about Human Evolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 13–21; James Shreeve, The Neanderthal Enigma: Solving the Mystery of Modern Human Origins, New York: William Morrow and Company, 1995, pp. 25–33. BJHS 49(3): 411–432, September 2016. © British Society for the History of Science 2016 doi:10.1017/S0007087416000650 http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0007087416000650 Downloaded from http:/www.cambridge.org/core. Arizona State University Libraries, on 12 Oct 2016 at 12:00:29, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at