The remains of over 400 Neanderthals have been discovered stretching across Europe
The Neanderthals had been living across Europe and parts of the middle east for approximately 250,000 years by the time modern humans from Africa turned up. With plenty of cool, dry caves to preserve their remains, scientists have found more than 400 Neanderthal skeletal remains from Germany and Croatia to Portugal, Belgium, France, Gibraltar, and Israel. The youngest Neanderthal fossils found come from southwestern Europe, and it is thought that that’s where they last held out before becoming extinct.
The first Neanderthal to be identified was found in Germany’s Neander Valley (“valley” = “thal” in German) as long ago as 1856.
Originally dismissed as being the remains of a cave bear, the skeleton was later recognized as being a pre-human. This was at a time when many people took religious texts to be the literal word of God and could not understand the concept of there being pre-humans before modern people.
Such was the curiosity about this skeleton—the first ancient human ever seen—that it inspired over 100 years of paleoanthropology: the quest to understand human origins that continues today.
In recent years, the question of where all humans come from has led to an extraordinary project of amazing technical ambition.
Following the Human Genome Project in which scientists sequenced the entire information contained within human DNA and published it as the so-called “Book of Life,” Max Planck Geneticist Svante Pääbo dreamed of finding, extracting, and then sequencing the full DNA of a Neanderthal.