Introduction

5 Introduction Although the first finds of fossil hominids date back to 1891, thinking about evolution of Man started at least as early as 1844 when Robert Chambers anonymously published his book ‘Vestiges of Natural History of Creation’, in which he presented a development theory. Chambers did not stress the point, but his development hypothesis clearly made Man an immediate descendant of the apes. The anatomist Richard Owen used his expertise to disprove the theory of evolution at its most controversial point –man’s link with the apes by pointing at the heavy eye-brows of the great apes, which were missing in modern Man. As the eyebrows are independently developed, nor influenced by inner or outer factors, Man must have, if Man was descendent from the great apes, heavy eyebrows; and that, he pointed out is not the case. However, a decade later in the Neanderthal near Düsseldorf a skull was found with heavy eyebrows. The fossil came into the hands of Hermann Schaaffhausen, professor of anatomy at the University of Bonn, who was convinced that the remains were very old and hominid. Their strange morphology was caused by deformation, but the oligocephalic form of the skull was, according to Schaaffhausen, not comparable to any modern race, not even with the most ‘barbarian’ races. The heavy eyebrows, characteristic for great apes, were according to Schaaffhausen typical for the Neanderthal. The skull therefore must have belonged to an ‘original wild race of North-western Europe’. Some even considered it as the skull of an idiot, an ‘old Dutchman’ or a Cossack. DUBO1426 Skull of Spy (Homo neanderthalensis) uncovered in 1887 6 Charles Darwin published his famous book ‘On the origin of species’ in 1859, and in it he set out a theory of evolution characterised by a gradual development in which natural selection is the thriving force. Although Darwin at that point chose not to mention the subject but ever so briefly, others were soon drawing the conclusion that there is no separation between Man and apes. In this context the Neanderthal skull became central in the discussion. Two ideas came up, which are still debated today: (1) Neanderthal Man belongs to recent Man; (2) Neanderthal Man is a species of its own. It was Thomas Huxley who set the tone of the discussion by describing the morphological characteristics of the Neanderthal as primitive, yet definitely human. He also pointed to the large brain capacity as proof of the Neanderthal's human nature. William King, professor of anatomy at DUBO4103 Thomas Huxley Queens College (Ireland), in contrast considered, without giving scientific arguments, Neanderthal Man as a new species and called it Homo neanderthalensis. Later finds were also generally ascribed to a (primitive) race of modern humans, such as the mandible of La Naulette and the Spy skeletons. For Ernst Haeckel fossils were no longer required to prove that Apes were part of the evolution of Man, because the process could be proven already by anatomy and embryology. He introduced the name Pithecanthropus to identify the missing link between Ape and Man. The species he called Pithecanthropus alalus, the ape-man without speech. Dubois and his Pithecanthropus Marie Eugène François Thomas Dubois was born in 1858, a year before Darwin published his Origin of species, and two years after the discovery of the first Slide that Dubois used in class of the Neanderthal skull. He grew up in a period that hypothesized Pithecanthropus alalus witnessed the rapid acceptance and dissemination of drawn by Gabriel Max the theory of evolution. During his youth the problem of human ancestry was central to many discussions on evolutionary theory. And by the end of his university studies opponents and supporters of an evolutionary ancestry for humans still agreed that no hominid fossils were known to provide proof of human evolution. Dubois was to be among the first to bring about a change in this climate of opinion. Born in Eijsden in the south of the Netherlands, near St. Peter's Mountain where in cretaceous rocks the remains of mosasaurs had been .

Load more