Hermann Schaaffhausen

Workmen quarrying the Feldhofer Grotte in the Neander Valley, near Düsseldorf in northern Germany, in 1856 unearthed human bones in the floor of the cave.

A local schoolmaster Johann Carl Fuhlrott, who was interested in geology and paleontology, learned of the discovery and went to the site to collect the unusual bones.

Fuhlrott and Schaaffhausen presented papers on the fossils and the geology of the Feldhofer Cave at a meeting of the Niederrheinische Gesellschaft für Natur- und Heilkunde (Lower Rhine Society for Natural History and Medical Studies) in Bonn in 1857.

Fuhlrott and Schaaffhausen believed the Neanderthal fossils dated from the Glacial Period when extinct animals such as mammoths and the woolly rhinoceros still lived in Europe, which would make them among the oldest human remains known.

He argued that the prominent bony ridges over the eyes and the general shape of the skull indicated that it belonged to a savage and barbarous race of human.

However, in 1864 William King, professor of geology at Queens College in Galway, Ireland, presented a paper where he argued the Neanderthal fossils belonged to an extinct species of early human that he named Homo neanderthalensis.