A fossilized skeleton discovered in 1856 presented naturalists with a unique challenge. The strange, human-looking bones of the first recognized Neanderthal confronted naturalists with a new type of object for which they had no readily available interpretive framework. This paper explores the techniques and approaches used to understand these bones in the years immediately following the discovery, in particular 1856–1864. Historians have previously suggested that interpretations and debates about Neanderthals hinged primarily on social, political and cultural ideologies. In this paper, (...) I will argue that much of the scientific controversy surrounding the first recognized Neanderthal centred on questions of methodology and practice, and will demonstrate this through an exploration of the tools and approaches naturalists utilized in their examinations of the fossils. This will contribute to a growing historical recognition of the complex exchange between disciplines including geology, archaeology and comparative anatomy in the early study of fossil hominins, and provide a future framework for histories of Neanderthal debates in the twentieth century. (shrink)

This paper explores how three central figures in the field of British prehistory – Sir Arthur Keith, Sir Grafton Elliot Smith and Louis Leakey – deployed different disciplinary practices and narrative devices in the popular accounts of human bio-cultural evolution that they produced during the early decades of the twentieth century. It shows how they used a variety of strategies, ranging from virtual witness through personal testimony to tactile demonstration, to ground their authority to interpret the increasingly wide range of (...) fossil material available and to answer the bewildering variety of questions that could be asked about them. It investigates the way in which they positioned their own professional expertise in relation to fossil interpretation, particularly with regard to the – sometimes controversial – use they made of concepts, evidence and practices drawn from other disciplines. In doing so, they made claims that went beyond their original disciplinary boundaries. The paper argues that while none of these writers were able, ultimately, to support the wider claims they made regarding human prehistory, the nature of these claims deserves much closer attention, particularly with respect to the public role that historians of science can and should play in relation to present-day calls for greater interdisciplinarity. (shrink)

ArgumentIn the 1920s there were still very few fossil human remains to support an evolutionary explanation of human origins. Nonetheless, evolution as an explanatory framework was widely accepted. This led to a search for ancestors in several continents with fierce international competition. With so little fossil evidence available and the idea of a Missing Link as a crucial piece of evidence in human evolution still intact, many actors participated in the scientific race to identify the human ancestor. The curious case (...) ofHomo gardarensisserves as an example of how personal ambitions and national pride were deeply interconnected as scientific concerns were sometimes slighted in interwar palaeoanthropology. (shrink)