Neanderthals were a human species that lived in Europe and adjacent regions of Asia between about 120 thousand and 30 thousand years ago. The original spelling was Neanderthals (still a preferred spelling in Britain) but the updated spelling reflects the German pronunciation and new German spelling. Neanderthals were apparently not ancestral to modern humans, and represent a separate line of evolution from an African species of hominin, probably Homo Heidelbergensis. Most anthropologists today accord them their own species status as Homo neanderthalensis. Because of their large brains, they are usually called humans despite a lack of direct evolutionary connection to the modern human species. Neanderthals have gotten a bad reputation far beyond what the evidence requires. They were probably the origin of the ferocious "cave man" image in popular culture, and "Neanderthal" is a favorite epithet of some politicians to describe their putatively stupid opponents.

The earliest discovery of Neanderthal remains were skeletal fragments of a child found at Engis Cave in Belgium about 1830. Much more famous was the 1848 discovery of a Neanderthal cranium at Forbes Quarry in Gibraltar. Neither of these discoveries was originally recognized as representing a different species of human. Only much later were the Gibraltar specimens, which were lying in a museum, recognized as also being Neanderthal remains.

Then in 1856, some obviously human limb bones, pelvis, and portion of a cranium were found by workmen excavating the Feldhofer Grotto in a limestone cliff in Germany. The cliff overlooked the Neander Valley (Neander-thal in German) through which the Dussel River flows toward its confluence with the Rhine at Dusseldorf. The valley was named after Joachim Neander, a 17th-century teacher and theologian who became famously controversial when he refused to take Holy Communion. The Neander Valley was to become famously controversial once again. The workmen brought the bones they had unearthed to a local schoolmaster and amateur naturalist, Johann Fuhlrott. Fuhlrott contacted Hermann Schaaffhausen, an anatomist at the University of Bonn. The cranium was human but had features, particularly a prominent eyebrow ridge of bone, not found in modern people. Fuhlrott and Schaaffhausen jointly presented the news of the discovery to scientists in Bonn in 1857, suggesting (two years before Charles Darwin published his famous book) that a "barbarous and savage race" had once occupied the cave . . .

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