ORIGIN STORY

What do we hope to learn from our prehistory?

- MAYA JASANOFF

In the summer of 1856, laborers at a limestone quarry near Düsseldorf were clearing mud and chert out of a cave when they turned up a fossilized skull. It was long and elliptical, with wide sinuses and a heavy ridge over the eye sockets. The workers thought it belonged to some kind of bear, but a local schoolteacher who inspected it had a different hunch. He thought that it was a previously undiscovered kind of human being. The British geologist William King, setting the skull alongside those of chimpanzees and Andaman Islanders, agreed; he declared that it belonged to an entirely new species, which he named Homo neanderthalensis, for the Neander Valley, where it was found.

What we know today as Neanderthals might have been called Engisians or Gibraltarians, if remains of the same species that were dug up earlier in Engis, a municipality in Belgium, and on the Iberian Peninsula had been accurately identified. In the event, English descriptions of the Neanderthal remains appeared at the same time as Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" (1859), and excited scientists who were mulling over the book's theory of natural selection. Thomas Henry Huxley, an enthusiastic Darwinian, viewed the fossils as proof that "we must extend by long epochs the most liberal estimate that has yet been made of the antiquity of Man." That extended era soon got a name: "prehistory," describing the period before humans recorded their existence in writing.