The World of Emperor Gon of Carthage
"Neanderthals"
Emperor Gon of Carthage
September 10, 2001
Neanderthals
Part 2
2. The animal-like Neanderthals
In the meantime, various hypotheses were being debated in England, which put the Schaaffhausen Cossack cavalryman theory at a disadvantage. During these hot debates, Prof. King of Queen's College used the name Neanderthal for the first time in 1863. In the same year, skeletons with similar characteristics were recovered in Gibraltar, which proved that th eNeanderthal could not possibly have been a deformed cavalry deserter. Furthermore in 1886, two nearly complete skeletons were found Spy Cave in Belgium. And thus the idea that men with an archaic structure much different from modern men had existed in ancient Europe was now an accepted idea.
But at the same time, the image of Neanderthals as being hairy, barbarous and mean-spirited animal-like men with crouching postures was also established. The skeletons found in Spy Cave had a tremendously heavy limb with large joints.
Fraipont and Lohest who performed a detailed anatomical analysis on these skeletons concluded that the owners of such skeletons walked on two legs very much like the ape-men.
And the Neanderthal skeleton of an older individual found in La Chapelle-aux-Saint had definitely established the classic image of Neanderthals.
Boule, a professor of paleontology at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, performed an anatomical and systematic research on this elderly man of La Chapelle-aux-Saint and wrote up an extensive and comprehensive report.
But what was unfortunate was that his research was intended to clearly demonstrate how inferior the Neanderthals were compared with modern men.
Boule had spread the reconstructed conception of Neanderthals staggering along like ape-men, slouching, and with a grimace on their faces. He failed to mention the size of his brain and only empathized their animal-like traits. The poor old man of La Chapelle-aux-Saint ended up as the representative of the slouched ape-men for ages to come.
In 1891 and 1892, Dubois discovered the fossils of Pithecanthropus (Java Man) in Indonesia that added a new page to the theory of human evolution. But again, Boule dismissed it as being merely a large type gibbon. For Boule who regarded Neanderthals as inferior animal-like creatures quite unlike humans, only a few ape-men like traits in the Neanderthals were enough to place them on a broken branch of the tree of human evolution.
Translated by Rie Ishida
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