Neanderthal 1

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The cranial vault of Neanderthal man from the Neandertal ( 1859 lithograph from a treatise by Johann Carl Fuhlrott )
Lateral view of the skull cap

Neandertal 1 (also Neanderthal 1 , more rarely Feldhofer 1 ) is the scientific name for the type specimen (holotype) of the biological species Homo neanderthalensis . The fossil was discovered in mid-August 1856 in what is known as the Neandertal valley section of the Düssel in Niederbergisches Land , 13 kilometers east of Düsseldorf, discovered and given the species name that is still used today in a scientific journal for the first time in 1864. However, it was not the first instance of this species to be discovered; rather, the importance of earlier finds was initially not recognized and therefore no separate species name was assigned for these finds.

The fossil has been kept in the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn since 1877 . Since the year 2000, the fossil of a second individual from the same locality has been definitely identified as Neanderthal, named Neandertal 2 .

discovery

Small Feldhofer Grotto (cross-section);
from: Charles Lyell (1863): The Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man.
Johann Carl Fuhlrott
Herman Schaaffhausen

Limestone quarrying in the Neandertal has been documented as early as the 16th century , and it took place on an industrial scale from the mid-19th century. In August 1856, two Italian workers widened the entrance to the Small Feldhof Cave by removing the sintered and therefore rock-hard clay embedded in this limestone cave . When removing this sediment filling, the workers came across fossil bones two feet (about 60 cm) below the surface, which were initially thrown unnoticed into the valley with clay and rock debris. There they were noticed by the owner of the quarry, Wilhelm Beckershoff, who mistook them for the remains of a cave bear . Beckershoff and the co-owner of the quarry, Friedrich Wilhelm Pieper, had 16 larger bone fragments collected from the rubble and handed over to the Elberfeld teacher and fossil collector Johann Carl Fuhlrott : a skullcap with a fragment of the left temporal bone , a fragment of the right shoulder blade , a right collarbone , both Humerus (the right one completely preserved), a complete right radius , fragments of a right and left ulna , five ribs , an almost complete left half of the pelvis as well as both completely preserved femurs .

According to Fuhlrott, he recognized right away that the remains belonged to a person who, however, differed significantly from people in modern times. Without Fuhlrott's approval, the following note appeared in the Elberfelder Zeitung and the Barmer Bürgerblatt on September 4, 1856:

“In the last few days, a surprising find has been made in the neighboring Neanderthal, the so-called rock. Through the breaking away of the limestone rocks, which of course cannot be lamented enough from the picturesque point of view, a cave was reached, which over the centuries had been filled with clay mud. In clearing away this clay a human skeleton was found, no doubt neglected and lost, if not fortunately Dr. Fuhlrott von Elberfeld would have secured and examined the find. After examining this skeleton, especially the skull, the human being belonged to the family of the Flatheads, who still live in the American West today, of which several skulls have also been found in recent years on the upper Danube near Siegmaringen . Perhaps this find will contribute to the discussion of the question: whether these skeletons belonged to a Central European primitive people or just to a horde (with Attila ?) roaming about.”

– Erich Leverkus : Retrieved from Archeologie Online

Through this reporting, two Bonn professors of anatomy , Hermann Schaaffhausen and August Franz Josef Karl Mayer , became aware of this find, contacted Fuhlrott and asked him to send the bones. Fuhlrott personally brought them to Bonn the following winter, where they were first inspected by Schaaffhausen. Six months later, on June 2, 1857, Schaaffhausen and Fuhlrott presented the results of their investigations to the members of the Natural History Association of the Prussian Rhineland and Westphalia , which the primatologist and paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall describes as follows:

"In doing so, Fuhlrott summarized the discovery history of these fossils, which was based on careful questioning of the workers who excavated the finds. He stressed the age of the bones, as evidenced both by the thickness of the overlying layers of soil [...] and by the high level of mineralization and dendritic formation on the surface, which was also found on the bones of the extinct giant cave bears. The description and interpretation of the find was Schaaffhausen's task."

Schaaffhausen described in detail the unusually massive bone structure of the find and highlighted the shape of the skull cap in particular - especially the low, receding forehead and the bony bulges over the eyes:

“He considered these traits to be natural rather than the result of disease or abnormal development. They reminded him of the great apes. Still, this was no great ape, and if its features were not pathological, they may have been due to the age of the finds. […] Although his search for specimens resembling Neanderthals was unsuccessful, he concluded that the bones belonged to a representative of an aboriginal tribe that had inhabited Germany before the arrival of the ancestors of modern humans.”

Schaaffhausen published his findings in 1858 in the Archives for Anatomy, Physiology and Scientific Medicine , and a year later Fuhlrott published a treatise on human remains from a rock grotto in the Düsselthal in the journal of the Natural History Association of the Prussian Rhineland and Westphalia. In this treatise he also discussed the anatomical conditions and initially mentioned cautiously (also taking into account their embedding in Ice Age clay deposits) that these bones presumably "date from the prehistoric period, probably from the diluvial period and therefore once belonged to a prototypical individual of our sex. ’ (p. 136) Following his comments on the geology of the find site, however, he then went on to assume that ‘these bones contain antediluviane [formed before the Flood ], i.e. fossil human remains’. (p. 145)

However, Fuhlrott's and Schaaffhausen's ultimately correct interpretation of the finds from the Neandertal was not taken seriously by the other scholars of their time. When Fuhlrott published his treatise in 1859 in the journal of the Natural History Association of the Prussian Rhineland and Westphalia , the members of the editorial board commented on his interpretations with the postscript, for example, that they "cannot share the views presented." (p. 153)

Historical background

Fossil finds from 1829 from Engis : lower center the upper jaw fragment of the Neanderthal child ( Engis 2 )

In 1758, in the 10th edition of his work Systema Naturae (p. 20) , Carl von Linné introduced the designation Homo sapiens as a species name for humans, but without a so-called diagnosis , i.e. without a precise description of the characteristics typical of the species.

In 1833, Dutch physician and naturalist Philippe-Charles Schmerling described a fossil skull and several other bones that had been discovered in 1829 in a cave near the municipality of Engis , Belgium . He assigned them to the " Diluvian " on the basis of animal fossils and stone tools that were also discovered . However , this first scientifically described Neanderthal find ( Engis 2 ) was misjudged by colleagues as "modern". On the one hand, there were no criteria for delimiting fossil species of the genus Homo from Homo sapiens ; on the other hand, specialist colleagues referred to the Bible ( 1st Book of Moses ), from which such a high age could not be derived.

Even Thomas Henry Huxley , a supporter of Darwin's theory of evolution, attributed the find from Engis in 1863 to "a man of a low degree of civilisation". He also interpreted the find from the Neanderthal as lying within the range of variation of modern man. The relatively well-preserved female skull Gibraltar 1 , discovered in 1848 in the Forbes' Quarry limestone quarry in Gibraltar , was only definitively recognized decades later as being thousands of years old and placed with the now established species Homo neanderthalensis .

Like Huxley, even anthropologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries still assigned the increasingly numerous hominin fossils to the human " races " as their early representatives.

Fund as a disputed object of scholars

Three views from Thomas Henry Huxley , Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature , London, 1863

The Neanderthal fossil was discovered in 1856, three years before Darwin's major work On the Origin of Species was published . However, the scientific debate about the question of whether species are immutable or mutable had flared up much earlier. As early as 1853, Hermann Schaaffhausen, in a detailed treatise on the persistence and transformation of species , agreed that "the species is not imperishable, that like the life of the individual it has a beginning, a period of flowering and a decline, only in longer periods of time, and that the different species have different lifespans." Schaaffhausen had even pointed out the close proximity of various anatomical and physiological features of humans and the "most human-like apes" and summed up: "The immutability of the species, which from considered by most researchers to be a law of nature has not been proven."

However, Hermann Schaaffhausen was not among the natural science authorities of mid-nineteenth-century Germany. At that time, the biological sciences were dominated here by Rudolf Virchow , “the father of modern cell biology and, for political reasons, an opponent of evolutionary ideas. Virchow represented social-liberal ideals. He fought for a society in which not origin, but the abilities of the individual should decide on his future. For him, the theory of evolution was elitism, a natural preference for a particular 'race' that was incompatible with his ideals.”

But before Virchow personally examined the bones from the Neandertal in 1872, he left them to the Bonn anatomist and eye specialist August Franz Josef Karl Mayer , who was "a determined supporter of the Christian belief in creation in its traditional form"; Mayer had missed the first assessment in the winter of 1856/57 due to illness:

“The latter certified rickety changes in bone development in Neanderthals […]. Mayer claimed, among other things, that the thigh and pelvic bones of Neanderthals were shaped like those of a human who had ridden all his life. The individual's fractured right arm had healed poorly and the constant worry lines over the pain were the reason for the pronounced ridges over the eyes . The skeleton was, he speculated, from a mounted Russian Cossack who was camped in the region around 1813/14 during the turmoil of the wars of liberation against Napoleon .”

Mayer's interpretations published in the Anatomy Archive in 1864 contradicted the then well-known and universally accepted key symptom of rickets (weakened bones), since the Neanderthals had extremely stable bones. Nevertheless, Virchow largely accepted Mayer's anatomical findings. Virchow described the bones as a “strange individual phenomenon” and as a “definitely individual formation” and thus ensured that the characteristics of the find from the Neandertal were considered in German-speaking countries to be an expression of pathological changes in the skeleton of a modern human being for years to come.

The accurate assessment of the geologist Charles Lyell , who had already confirmed the great age of the find in 1863 after visiting Fuhlrott and the Neandertal, did not change this. In retrospect, the turning point towards the recognition of the find as not pathologically altered occurred as early as 1863/64.

William King

On the one hand, the English geologist William King published a detailed description of the physique of the Reputed Fossil Man of the Neanderthal in 1864 , in which he - for lack of other comparison possibilities - particularly emphasized the ape-like features of the fossil. At the very end of this paper, in a footnote after the last word, King mentions that he had given a presentation of similar content to the geological section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science the year before, but was now even more certain that the fossil , which he called "Homo Neanderthalensis" at the time. called, is generally distinguishable from man (“generally distinct from man”). This casual designation, chosen by King for the Neanderthal fossil in footnote 27, is now considered to be the definition of the species name under the international rules of zoological nomenclature .

On the other hand, the British paleontologist George Busk , who had translated the Schaaffhausen treatise into English in 1861, was able to examine the skull discovered in 1848 from the limestone quarry Forbes' Quarry in Gibraltar in 1862. Because of its resemblance to the Neandertal find, Busk scoffed: "Whatever may have happened on the banks of the Düssel, even Professor Mayer would hardly suspect that a rickety Cossack of the 1814 campaign hid in the brittle crevices of the Rock of Gibraltar However, the Neanderthals were only finally recognized as an independent human form deviating from Homo sapiens after two almost completely preserved Neanderthal skeletons were found in 1886 in a cave in Spy (today part of the municipality of Jemeppe-sur-Sambre ) in Belgium had been.

anthropological analyses

The discussion in the 19th century was initially devoted to the question of the extent to which anthropological findings could be reconciled with characteristics of Homo sapiens . Johann Carl Fuhlrott had already noticed the massiveness of the bones, which was unusual in comparison to the people of his time, as well as the strongly developed humps, ridges and ridges, which served to attach correspondingly strongly developed muscles. According to his observation, one of the upper arm bones had a healed injury. In 1864, William King also referred to the unusual thickness of the skeleton bones and agreed with a comment by Schaaffhausen, who had also rated the strongly rounded shape of the ribs and thus the chest as quite unusual for a human being. However, King was mainly concerned with the construction of the surviving skull bones. He described its shape as "elongated oval" and about an inch longer than a recent Briton; the width of the skull, on the other hand, hardly exceeds that of modern humans. Like Schaaffhausen previously, King described the forehead region as unusually flat and receding and the bony ridges over the eyes as "overdeveloped". Finally, summarizing the characteristics that differ from modern humans, King wrote:

“The Neanderthal skull was immediately perceived as uniquely different from all others recognized to belong to the human species; and undoubtedly its features bear a close resemblance to those of a young chimpanzee .”

Intravital injuries and diseases

Studies by the Göttingen pathologist Michael Schultz at the beginning of the 21st century also focused on the health of the Neanderthal holotype. They were able to show that in several cases there was a pathological muscle-tendon process, as well as a fracture of the left arm in the area of ​​the elbow joint with a resulting misalignment of the bones. The misalignment led to a permanent impairment, since the Neanderthal man could no longer regularly put weight on this arm even after the fracture had healed.

There is a healed bone injury in the frontal bone, which is attributed to falling on a sharp-edged stone. In addition, Neandertal 1 apparently had a healed hemorrhage from a brain vessel , which is also attributed to intravital (during his lifetime) traumatic effects.

Neanderthal 1 suffered from extensive inflammation of the paranasal sinuses. Both frontal sinuses show symptoms of chronic inflammation in the form of a bumpy surface covered with small vascular imprints. In old age, he also suffered from a serious illness that had never before been diagnosed in a Neanderthal. It is a metastatic , bone-eating process of unknown cause.

His age at death was determined to be between 40 and 42 years.

Postmortem changes in the skeleton

In 1992 alleged cut marks on the skeletal remains were published, especially on the edges of the skull cap, which would indicate a special burial rite . Given the rudimentary preservation of the skeleton (16 of 203 bones), the influence of carnivorous tooth scraping is also conceivable. However, given the superficial and unscientific salvage of the bones, the question of disarticulation (breaking up of the skeletal structure) by predators remains difficult to resolve.

Subsequent excavations in 1997 and 2000

Neanderthal 1, side view. Attached to the front is the piece of the temporal bone and cheekbone discovered in 2000 .

From 1991, the bones of the Neanderthals were analyzed again by an international team of researchers using modern methods. For example, radiocarbon dating gave an age of 39,900 ± 620 years ( BP ); this Neanderthal was therefore one of the last populations of this human species in Europe. Furthermore, in 1997 mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) was obtained from the humerus of the type specimen Neanderthal 1 , the first mtDNA sample ever from a Neanderthal. In the publication, these first analysis results were interpreted very cautiously. Nonetheless, they suggested that Neanderthals were genetically distant from anatomically modern humans. The title of the issue of the journal Cell read: "Neanderthals were not our ancestors" . The decoding of the Neanderthal genome in 2010 and later publications put this statement into perspective.

Also in September 1997, subsequent excavations in the Neandertal succeeded in reconstructing the exact location of the former “Small Feldhof Cave” ( 51° 13′ 38″  N , 6° 56′ 40″  E ). Underneath the remains of loamy cave fillings and blasting debris from limestone quarrying, some stone implements and then a total of 20 more Neanderthal bone fragments were discovered; until then no stone tools had been handed down from this cave. In 2000, excavations continued and another 40 human teeth and bone fragments were discovered, including a piece of the temporal and cheekbones that fitted exactly to the top of the skull. A bone splinter could be assigned to the left femur in the knee area with an exact fit.

The discovery of a third humerus attracted particular attention: two humeruses had been known since 1856. The remains of a second, more delicately built individual had now been discovered; at least three other bone fragments are also duplicated. This find, known as Neandertal 2 , was dated to be 39,240 ± 670 years (BP), so it is exactly as old as the Neandertal 1 fossil . this molar has been attributed to a juvenile Neanderthal (the third individual). This milk tooth was stolen from a showcase in the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann in 2004 , but was returned there a short time later. On the basis of the signs of abrasion and the tooth roots that have already partially dissolved , one would conclude that modern people would have lived between 11 and 14 years of age.

After the end of the excavations, an archaeological garden was laid out over the site of the excavations, the installations of which are intended to symbolize the eventful history of the site. The small park belongs to the neighboring Neanderthal Museum, which provides a chronological outline of human evolution .

literature

  • William King: The Reputed Fossil Man of the Neanderthal. In: W. Eric Meikle, Sue Taylor Parker (eds.): Naming our Ancestors. An Anthology of Hominid Taxonomy. Waveland Press, Prospect Heights (Illinois) 1994, ISBN 0-88133-799-4 , pp. 22–35 (reprint of King's original work).
  • Ralf W. Schmitz et al.: The Neandertal type site revisited: Interdisciplinary investigations of skeletal remains from the Neander Valley, Germany. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Vol. 99, No. 20, 2002, pp. 13342–13347, doi:10.1073/pnas.192464099 (free access to the full text).
  • Friedemann Schrenk , Stephanie Müller: The Neanderthals. CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-50873-1 .
  • Ralf W. Schmitz (ed.): Neanderthal 1856-2006. (= Rhenish excavations . Volume 58). Philipp von Zabern, Darmstadt 2006, ISBN 3-8053-3667-5 .

web links

Commons : Neandertal 1  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

supporting documents

  1. ↑ The writing of the lemma Neandertal 1 follows: Wilhelm Gieseler: Germany. In: Kenneth Page Oakley et al. (Ed.): Catalog of Fossil Hominids: Europe Pt. 2. Smithsonian Institution Proceedings, 1971, pp. 198-199. – As a result of the Orthographic Conference of 1901 , the previous spelling of Thal became Tal , to which the collection number could be adapted; The journal Science , published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science , also follows this spelling ( sciencemag.org: The Neandertal Genome ). The International Rules for Zoological Nomenclature, on the other hand, do not allow such a change of valid naming of genus and species names, which is why the Latin name is still Homo neanderthalensis .
  2. ↑ William King : The Reputed Fossil Man of the Neanderthal. In: Quarterly Journal of Science. Volume 1, 1864, pp. 88–97, full text (PDF; 356 kB)
  3. ↑ a b Michael Schmauder, Ralf W. Schmitz: The Neanderthal and other Ice Age finds in the Rheinisches LandesMuseum Bonn. In: Heinz Günter Horn (ed.): Neanderthal + Co. Philipp von Zabern, Mainz am Rhein 2006, ISBN 3-8053-3603-9 , pp. 252-253.
  4. ↑ The grotto was named after the nearby Gut Feldhof.
  5. ↑ Gerd-Christian Weniger: Mettmann - locality Neandertal. In: Heinz Günter Horn (ed.): Neanderthal + Co. Philipp von Zabern, Mainz am Rhein 2006, ISBN 3-8053-3603-9 , p. 183. - Pieper and Beckershoff were members of the natural scientific association founded by Fuhlrott for Elberfeld and Barmen ; Pieper informed Fuhlrott about the find.
  6. ↑ Friedemann Schrenk, Stephanie Müller: The Neanderthals. CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-50873-1 , p. 14.
  7. ↑ Johann Carl Fuhlrott: Human remains from a rock grotto in the Düsselthal. p. 137.
  8. ↑ The text is u. a. printed in Friedemann Schrenk, Stephanie Müller: The Neanderthals. p. 9 and the full text can be found at archaeologie-online.de and at tierundnatur.de
  9. ↑ Ian Tattersall : Neanderthals. The dispute about our ancestors. Birkhäuser Verlag, Basel 1999, ISBN 3-7643-6051-8 , pp. 74–75.
  10. ↑ Ian Tattersall: Neanderthals. The dispute about our ancestors. p. 76.
  11. ↑ Hermann Schaaffhausen: To the knowledge of the oldest racial skulls. In: Archives for anatomy, physiology and scientific medicine. 1858, pp. 453–478.
  12. ↑ Johann Carl Fuhlrott: Human remains from a rock grotto in the Düsselthal. A contribution to the question of the existence of fossil humans. In: Negotiations of the Natural History Association of the Prussian Rhineland and Westphalia. Volume 16, 1859, pp. 131–153, full text (PDF; 4.1 MB)
  13. ↑ Philippe-Charles Schmerling : Recherches sur les ossements fossiles discovered dans les caverns de la Province de Liège. P.-J. Collardin, Liège 1833, pp. 1–66.
  14. ↑ Thomas Henry Huxley : On some fossil remains of man. Chapter 3 in: Evidence as to man's place in nature. D Appleton and Company, New York 1863.
  15. ↑ Hermann Schaaffhausen: On the persistence and transformation of species. In: Negotiations of the Natural History Association of the Prussian Rhineland and Westphalia. Volume 10, 1853, pp. 420-451.
    Reprinted in: Hermann Schaaffhausen: On persistence and transformation of species. In: ibid.: Anthropological Studies. Verlag von Adolph Marcus, Bonn 1885, pp. 134-164, (digital copy)
  16. ↑ Ian Tattersall: Neanderthals. The dispute about our ancestors. p. 77.
  17. ↑ Martin Kuckenberg: Was Eden in the Neandertal? In Search of Early Man. Econ Verlag, Düsseldorf 1997, ISBN 3-430-15773-0 , p. 51.
  18. ↑ a b Friedemann Schrenk, Stephanie Müller: The Neanderthals. p. 16.
  19. ↑ FJC Mayer: On the fossil remains of a human skull and skeleton in a rock cave in the Düssel or Neander valley. In: Archives for anatomy, physiology and scientific medicine. (Müller's Archiv), No. 1, 1864, pp. 1-26.
    FJC Mayer: On the question of the age and descent of the human race. In: Archives for anatomy, physiology and scientific medicine. (Müller's Archiv), 1864, pp. 696-728.
  20. ↑ Charles Lyell : The geological evidence of the antiquity of man. John Murray,London 1863.
  21. ↑ William King, The Reputed Fossil Man of the Neanderthal. In: Quarterly Journal of Science. Volume 1, 1864, p. 96.
  22. ↑ William King: On the Neanderthal Skull, or Reasons for believing it to belong to the Clydian Period and to a species different from that represented by Man. In: British Association for the Advancement of Science, Notices and Abstracts for 1863, Part II. London 1864, p. 81 f.
  23. ↑ George Busk : Pithecoid Priscan Man from Gibraltar. In: The Reader. A Review of Literature, Science, and Art. July 23, 1864 ( digitized )
  24. ↑ Ian Tattersall: Neanderthals. The dispute about our ancestors. p. 81.
  25. ↑ Johann Carl Fuhlrott: Human remains from a rock grotto in the Düsselthal. p. 140.
  26. ↑ William King, The Reputed Fossil Man of the Neanderthal. p. 90ff.
  27. ↑ "(In these general characters,) the Neanderthal skull is at once observed to be singularly different from all others which admittedly belong to the human species; and they undoubtedly invest it with a close resemblance to that of a young Chimpanzee."
  28. ↑ Michael Schultz: The Neanderthal from the small Feldhofer grotto - attempt at a reconstruction of his state of health. In: Gabriele Uelsberg (ed.): Roots: roots of humanity. Catalog manual for the exhibition in the Rheinisches Museum Bonn, Verlag Philipp von Zabern in Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Mainz 2006, ISBN 3-8053-3602-0 , pp. 123-132.
  29. ↑ a b c Michael Schultz: Results of the anatomical-palaeopathological investigations on the Neanderthal skeleton from the Kleine Feldhofer Grotte (1856) including the new discoveries from 1997/2000. In: Rhenish excavations. Volume 58, 2006, pp. 277–318.
  30. ↑ Ralf-W. Schmitz and Peter Pieper : Cut marks and scratches. Anthropogenic changes in the skeleton of prehistoric man from the Neanderthal - preliminary findings. In: The Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn. Volume 2, 1992, pp. 17-19.
  31. ↑ Gerd-Christian Weniger: Mettmann - locality Neandertal. In: Heinz Günter Horn (ed.): Neanderthaler + Co. Philipp von Zabern, Mainz am Rhein 2006, ISBN 3-8053-3603-9 , p. 187.
  32. ↑ a b Matthias Krings et al.: Neandertal DNA Sequences and the Origin of Modern Humans. In: Cell. Vol. 90, No. 1, 1997, pp. 19-30, doi:10.1016/S0092-8674(00)80310-4
  33. ↑ Mateja Hajdinjak, Qiaomei Fu, Alexander Hübner, Martin Petr, Fabrizio Mafessoni, Steffi Grote, Pontus Skoglund, Vagheesh Narasimham, Hélène Rougier, Isabelle Crevecoeur, Patrick Semal, Marie Soressi, Sahra Talamo, Jean-Jacques Hublin, Ivan Gušić, Željko Kućan , Pavao Rudan, Liubov V. Golovanova, Vladimir B. Doronichev, Cosimo Posth, Johannes Krause, Petra Korlević, Sarah Nagel, Birgit Nickel, Montgomery Slatkin, Nick Patterson, David Reich, Kay Prüfer, Matthias Meyer, Svante Pääbo, Janet Kelso: Reconstructing the genetic history of late Neanderthals . In: Nature . 2018, ISSN  0028-0836 . doi : 10.1038/nature26151 .
  34. ↑ Ralf W. Schmitz et al.: The Neandertal type site revisited: Interdisciplinary investigations of skeletal remains from the Neander Valley, Germany. In: PNAS . Vol. 99, No. 20, 2002, pp. 13342-13347, doi:10.1073/pnas.192464099
  35. ↑ Compare to: In the footsteps of the Neanderthals. Upper arm bones and a milk tooth complete the finds from the Neandertal. On: faz.net from September 9, 2002.
  36. ↑ Breathe a sigh of relief in the Erkrather Museum: Neanderthal teeth are back. On: rp-online.de from April 8, 2004.
  37. ↑ Ralf W. Schmitz et al.: The Neandertal type site revisited. Interdisciplinary investigations of skeletal remains from the Neander Valley, Germany. In: PNAS. Vol. 99, No. 20, 2002, p. 13344; doi:10.1073/pnas.192464099 , full text (PDF)