The skull was presented to the Gibraltar Scientific Society by its secretary, Lieutenant Edmund Henry Réné Flint, on 3 March 1848.

Found more than ten years before the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and eight years prior to the famous discovery in the Neander Valley, the significance of the find was not understood at the time, and the skull was simply labelled as "an ancient human, died before the universal flood" and remained forgotten inside a cupboard at the Garrison Library for many years.

[3] After the publication of Origin of Species, a renewed interest in the fossil human remains led to the skull being brought out of obscurity, and presented at a meeting in the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1864.

[4] Until the late twentieth century, it was believed that the last Neanderthals disappeared about 35,000 years ago.

However, studies have suggested that Neanderthals survived in southern Iberia and Gibraltar to less than 30,000 years before the present.