Johann Carl Fuhlrott

Originally disregarded, Fuhlrott, to his eternal credit, had the insight to recognize them for what they were: the remains of a previously unknown type of human.

His parents had died by the time he was ten and he was raised by his uncle, the Catholic priest Carl Bernhard Fuhlrott, in Seulingen.

In 1856, workers in a lime quarry in the nearby canyon called Gesteins or Neandertal (southwest of Mettmann) showed him bones they had found in a cave and thought to belong to a bear.

Their views were not readily accepted as it contradicted literal interpretations of the Bible, and Charles Darwin's work about evolution had not yet been published.

Today, Fuhlrott and Schaaffhausen are considered to be the founders of paleoanthropology, and the taxon they discovered is referred to as Homo neanderthalensis in honor of the site where it was first identified.