Chapter 2 – The History of the Classification - A Valley of Evidence

A Valley of Evidence

Over the years I have been in many research and development projects. It is odd how things in life seem to have a recurring theme. The experience a researcher obtains after several projects mirrors the experience of growing from childhood to being an adult. When you are a child you think you have a good understanding of what is going on around you. You believe that as you grow you are mastering all the problems that present themselves. It is not until later in life that you begin to realize how really ignorant you were as a child and how all the additional learning has made you just more acutely aware of your inadequacy. My research career has certainly been that way. When I was a young graduate student at Clemson University, I can remember riding my bicycle to the Physics lab thinking hard about why I had obtained the answers that I had. I would labor over my research results, over manuscripts, papers and textbooks trying to fund a thread that connected them all. Where within these mounds of data was the answer that I knew in my heart was waiting to jump off the page? As a young officer in the United States Air Force I was then tasked with several more projects that I spent large potions of my waken hours pouring over. By the time I had started my own company developing software and computer security solutions, I began to see why my labors had always been so difficult. I had always started my projects with a clear set of established thought. The thoughts that I had were fomented through years of education, During my education I listened and repeated what I had heard and seen. By graduate school the problems I was facing were problems that could not be solved by the already established thoughts. If they could be solved that way it is likely they would have already had been. I was looking for common threads of established knowledge within my problems. I often found them but they never satisfied the complete rigors of testing. When I started my own company we chose a quote by Albert Einstein as our credo

“You can not solve the problems of today with the logic that was used to create them in the past”

After reading Gary Zukav’s book the Dancing Wu Li Masters I finally came to realize how important the quote by Einstein is. At some point the child in you must be willing to say the Emperor is not wearing clothes. But when you stand up to say this, you risk the threat of being beheaded. The Emperor does not like to be called into question and when he is he becomes upset.

The period between 1850 and 1910 was a significant time for scientific upheaval in the world. The inventions and discoveries that began around 1850 made conscious humans take another look at their surroundings. Today, we are still trapped by the legacy of these thoughts. Consider for a moment between 1876 and 1879 Edison introduced everything from the telephone to the electric light bulb. In 1865 Maxwell published his famous equations that began the rethinking of Newtonian Mechanics. Boolean algebra, the speed of light, Darwin’s Origin of the Species, the automobile, first flight, radio and movies they all came about during this period. But this is just the start. The advances in medicine, biology and the understanding of ourselves as humans became drastically different. With all these changes it is no wonder the US erupted in civil war and things such as slavery began to be dismantled across the globe. Even those that practiced it like those in the Old Confederacy changed their notions of it. Little known but significant in noting the Confederacy outlawed at least the International slave trade process.

With all the new scientific understandings emerging it is hard to believe that the interpretations of Blumenbach’s racial classification scheme would go unchanged. With our hindsight we see the changes that occurred are little more than embarrassing for noted anatomist, biologists and anthropologists of the time. When we look at the events that unfolded and the discoveries that were made, we find that those that were willing to “call the emperor naked” publicly were attacked with great vigor. Today the Anthropology community still argues over a set of bones found in a valley in 1856. As much as I would like to think that today the arguments are grounded in science without political and religious bias, I fear that statement is still too bold. Although there had been earlier finds, it was in the German valley of Neander that the first serious anthropologic quest of early humans began. To this day, I believe that a quote attributed to F.A. Montagu still encapsulates the most popular collective thought –

“Descended from the apes? Let us hope that it is not true. But if it is, let us pray that it may not become generally known.”

In 1856 an industrial quarrying operation discovered the skeletal remains of what appeared to be a human skeleton –mixed with the bones of a bear they were collectively referred to bear bones by the foreman. The team had come across an opening to a cavern located 20 meters above the valley floor now called the Feldholf caves. To get to the remains the team climbed the ridge effacement and blasted open a small opening to reveal not only the remains of the individual but also many other animal bones. By February of 1857 a local German anatomist named Hermann Shauffhasen took the bold step of declaring to the world that he had uncovered the remains of a primitive form of human. The find in general was not actually the first of its kind in fact. However, it was the first event to trigger a radically collective difference of perception in the origins of mankind. In the three decades leading up to the Neander Valley (Thal is German for Valley) ancient human skeletal remains and ancient stone tools had been unearthed and refuted as being of prehistoric stature. In this case Shauffhasen had enough of pieces of one individual to conclusively show that something or someone had lived and died in some ancient time in the Neanderthal. Osteomorphology of the bones is so significantly different than any other known human structure it is hard to cast the skeletal remains as then modern humans. However, those unwilling to call “the Emperor Naked” attempted to do just that. The well known German anatomist of the times, Rudolph Virchow, called the skeletal remains those of a deceased bow-legged pathological idiot suffering from rickets. Furthermore, others attempted to attribute the bones to a left behind Russian Cossack from the Napolenonic wars. The first anatomist of any stature to conclude that the Neanderthal bones were more than left over remains from recent history was a gentleman from Britain named Thomas Huxley. His publication of Man’s Place in Nature originally circulated the scientific community in 1863. Huxley had studied the bones in great detail and through correlation with Darwin’s theory of evolution Huxley determined the bones were some forms of lesser human along the evolutionary chain to present day Homo Sapiens.

Today we know the Neanderthal groups as Homo Sapien Neandertalensis. (It is worth noting here the spelling of the formal name of classification. The proper German spelling includes an ‘h’, however, this pronunciation caused considerable consternation in British publications. Therefore the ‘h’ has been removed and future reference within the manuscript will adhere to that notation.) Let us consider now for a moment the significance of this classification. Placing the term Homo and Sapien before the term Neandertal suggested that these bones were very close to human, but not quite. This suggests an evolutionary tree that present day man grew from some lower order of animals. A sort of suggestions that nature through time allowed some quadropedal ape to leave the trees and begin to walk upright. I ask the adroit reader trained in anthropology or those trained in religious philosophies to bear with me on these thoughts. Certainly we are not reaching any conclusion based on one set of bones but are rather attempting to show the behavior of the development of these theories.

At the time of these findings Biblical scholars in the west were working ardently to shore up declining control of the Christian Church. Scientist of the 17th, 18th and 19th century spent countless hours deriving the time of the origins of man (long has the soul of man wanted to make discreet that, which is really a continuum). Many intellects of the time pointed out that clearly the Noachian tales placed recent man approximately 3500 years in age. Some were even so bold as to declare the precise day of creation, the Noachian flood and other significant events of the Bible. Arch Bishop Ussher declared in his work Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti, Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise on a Monday November 10th in 4004 BC. Furthermore he also calculated that the ark touched down on Mt Ararat on Wednesday the 5th of May 1491 BC. Given the acts of the past it only made since to concur with these notions. How could such great scholars that agreed with common Religious norms be incorrect. As early as 1655, a Frenchman, Isaac de la Peye’re published his thoughts entitled A Theological System Upon the Pre-supposition that Men Were Before Adam. For this act of “heresy” Peye’re was imprisoned by the Church forced to recant and his book was publicly burnt in Paris. Despite the mounting physical evidence it was difficult to declare man had evolved from a lesser order. Armed with the bone record evidence found in Germany, France, and England, the scientific papers of Darwin and the genetic research of Mendel, the notion of creation began to loose favor amongst the scientific community.

Neandertal man introduced quite the conundrum to accepted beliefs. Evolutionary theory was beating on the door of religious creationism. With more and more Neandertal bones and artifacts being found throughout Southern Europe the visitor did not appear to be leaving. It is not easy to accept that the original understanding of an idea is incorrect. Furthermore, when the idea challenges the basis of the religious structure of society the response is tumultuous. In this case the visitors were storming the castle and within the castle stood the cultural identity of Western man. Westerners specifically had a couple of choices at the time. Ignore the knocking at the door and hope the visitor left. However, the knocking grew louder and it was only a matter of time that the walls of the castle and understanding of mankind fell to the incessant pounding. Another choice was to attack the visitor at the door. To this day some still choose this path. However, the visitor seems only to grow in strength and the attacks to him seem only to deplete the resources of the original castle. The final alternative was to accept the visitor, dress him up and claim that he was a lost noble relative that supported the polices of the castle after all. Although today there are those hold outs that want to attack the prehistoric finds, by enlarge westerners have begun to accept in some form this ancient find is a relative to us and should be accepted into our family. But the introduction of the Neandertal visitor has not been that easy.





By 1908 Marcellin Boule, a French Anthropologist reviewed a burial from La-Chapelle-aux-Saints rock shelters in Vezere Valley in southwest France. In his publication of his study he characterized the bones of Neandertal as a brutish caveman that was an extinct slow-witted slouched hunter with limited intellectual ability. Boule attempted to show through osteomorphology that the Neandertal skeletal finds proved no relation to present day humans. In time Molecular Biology would provide insight into Boule’s opinion based on the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) research conducted in the late 1990s. However, the opinion is still out on the relation of Neandertal to present day humans. Any review of Milford Wolpoff’s works will quickly demonstrate a very different opinion and set of theories. In 1908 Boule did not have enough information to solidify his positions. Yet, again crainiology came into play, specifically with the discussion of the limited frontal lobe area. It is important to note here that the average cranial volume of Neandertal is commensurate in some cases larger with that of present day humans. However, the shape of the typical Neandertal skull is very different from present day skulls. We will explore this artifact of information in more detail in the future.

Quiet conversations held amongst confidants reveal the essence of the typical understanding of these ancient bones. “Blacks might be evolved from monkeys – look at ‘em. Whites though are different.” This is the trouble with the evolutionary theory as an introduction of how mankind understands himself. In order to dress up the visitor and declare him noble began with the Neandertal finds. With Boule declaring Neandertal a brute, and attempting to show the lack of relation with present day mankind placed the scientific community in a sense of schizophrenia. Did Westerners evolve from apes or not? At the turn of the century it seemed clear that Darwin’s theory of evolution had at least basic legitimacy. If that was the case and westerners had evolved from some lower order, certainly it was not from the same lower order animal from which the other races had evolved. It became by enlarge the position of European scientist that the separation of the races had occurred during the time when our forefathers were still prosimian in nature. Given this level of separation was so far in the distant past it was still okay to modify other cultures. Thinking that the evolutionary position of other races was still a lower order of that of pale skinned Western Europeans provided a way to allow evolutionary theory to continue within the constructs of political processes. Some scientists of the time were so determined to maintain their own understanding of mankind that they engaged in perhaps the greatest scientific forgery and hoax of all time – The Pilt-down Man. By 1910, with the introduction of the Pilt-down man in Britain it was clear, Europeans had evolved from a different ape, at a far earlier time than any other race. The races differed so significantly that court cases in America even ruled it a requirement for whites and “negro” be separated to insure “public peace and good order”. Then came Dubois and eventually the exposure of Pilt-down.