Nordrhein-Westfalen - The Descent of Man

Although the coal-mining industry is in decline in Germany, as elsewhere in Europe, the cultural and sociological impact of mining is still felt, even in the 21st century, whether it's through the physical effect that mining has had on the landscape, or the legacy of rapid industrialisation that has left the Ruhr/Rhine valleys with significant conurbation, the current population of the Ruhr/Rhine metropolitan area being around 11 million people.  It reminds me a lot of similar conurbations in England - Birmingham, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire - also a result of 19th century industrialisation.

The Origins of Man

Skulls of Homo Erectus, Neanderthalensis and Sapiens

One indirect result of mining in the 19th century, as I learned when I was blogging about dinosaurs, was the discovery of fossils and dinosaur bones, which coincided with a growing interest in Richard Owen's terrible lizards, but no doubt also sparked renewed interest in the origins of man/woman.  The Neanderthal Valley, just outside Dusseldorf, is most famous for the discovery, in 1856, of a now extinct species of human being we call Homo (Sapiens) Neanderthalensis.  I've put the Sapiens in brackets, as we're still not 100% sure whether Neanderthal man/woman was a different species of human or a sub-species.

Actually, as with the Iguanadons of Bernissart, the Belgians probably have more right than the English or Germans to claim the discovery of dinosaurs and homo neanderthalensis.  The first Neanderthal skull was actually found in Belgium in 1829, although it wasn't recognised as a Neanderthal skull until much later, in the 1930's.

Neanderthal Man by Matt Celeskey

The New Man of Dusseldorf

By some quirk of history, the Neanderthal Valley was named after a 17th century protestant theologian from Bremen, Joachim Neander (thal actually means 'valley', so it's 'Neander's Valley').  It was a place that he loved to visit and a source of inspiration for the hymns that made him famous. 

Neander's grandfather was also a musician and changed the family name from the Germanic Neumann (Newman) to the Greek Neander, as was fashionable at that time.  So the extinct human species that populated much of pre-historic Europe is, ironically, called 'new man'.

I'd imagine that the Greek meaning hidden in Neanderthal wasn't lost on 19th century scientists who would also have been, no doubt, versed in the Classics.  Perhaps this influenced the permanent choice of name for this creature which was, by the way, first proposed by the Anglo-Irish geologist, William King.  I must admit that I'm slightly amused by the alternative name for homo neanderthalensis, proposed by the German biologist, Ernst Haeckel, which was homo stupidus!  Say it like it is, Ernst!

Darwin and the Caveman

On a more serious note, our understanding of Homo Neanderthalensis has interesting things to say about modern human culture and how we feel about Darwinism and the theory of evolution.  Traditionally, Neanderthal man/woman has been depicted as a kind of 'caveman/woman' - slightly bigger than modern man/woman, with a pronounced forehead - a bigger brain, yes, but definitely stupider than us.  In popular culture, the Neanderthal man/caveman is depicted as very definitely not us - we're obviously much smarter, more modern and only distantly related, as though Neanderthal man/woman was the result of a bad marriage.

Exhibit comparing skulls by Matt Celeskey

The reality is that Neanderthal man/woman may not just be a distant relative but may, indeed, be part of our ancestry.  The relationship between homo neanderthalensis and homo sapiens (ourselves) still seems to be a controversial one - traditional schools of thought say that Neanderthal man/woman was overpowered by the superior homo sapiens and became extinct, essentially because of their stupidity or inability to adapt to the changing political landscape.

As I hinted at in my blog post about the Celts in England, I can't help wondering whether the reality wasn't more complicated than that - perhaps rather than one species/tribe replacing the other, they somehow merged and we are actually part Neanderthal, part Sapiens.  I can sense that you're squirming after having read that last sentence, the question is why?

The Descent of Man

By coincidence and unrelated to my research on Nordrhein-Westfalen, I've started watching the 1970's BBC documentary The Ascent of Man, presented by the wonderful Jacob Bronowski.  The series assumes that man/woman have ascended, in the pyramid of species, to the superior position we see ourselves in today.  However, a lot of what I've been reading recently (The Naked Ape, When Languages Die . .) has made me think more about what I would call The Descent of (Wo)man - a descent in two senses:

1. Descent from the trees - the way we've evolved has been influenced by our decision to come down from the safety of the trees and fight for survival on the open plain.

2. Descent into system-slavery - rather than living a natural life, in tune with the rhythms of the universe - the moon, stars, sun, animal and plant life - we have created systems - clocks, computers, calendars - which control our lives and reduce them to unnatural rhythms, bringing us down into a kind of slavery, over which we have little control.

I'm beginning to think we really are homo stupidus after all.

You can watch Part 1 of The Ascent of Man - Lower than the Angels below:

A note on the sexism of the Homo Neanderthalensis discussion

Homo Neanderthalensis is very much a man!  Everything you read or watch in relation to the origin of our species, talks about man or cavemen, rather than woman or cavewoman.  There is an inherent sexism in this area of science that is very difficult to get away from, although I've tried!

Image credits:

For this blog post, I wanted to highlight the photos of Flickr member hairymuseummatt a.k.a. Matt Celeskey who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  These photos were taken at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology in the University of New Mexico, as well as the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio.

You can see more of Matt's photos on his photo stream.  Thanks Matt for sharing these images with us, using the Creative Commons license. 

Dorset - How the English invented Dinosaurs

It was only when I first visited Dorset that I heard of the county's 'Jurassic Coast', one of the UK's 28 UNESCO World Heritage sites.  It starts in Devon, actually, not far from Exmouth and continues all the way to Swanage in East Dorset.  It includes geological wonders such as the Isle of Portland, which is a tied island, ie. only linked to the mainland by a spit of gravel, known as a tombolo.  Portland is famous for its limestone and Portland stone has been used in important buildings like St Paul's Cathedral, Buckingham Palace and the UN world headquarters in New York.

Remarkable Creatures

The Jurassic coast became the haunt of geologists and palaeontologists, in the 19th century, when scientists became interested in fossils of 'remarkable creatures' that were abundant along this coast, notably in the area around Lyme Regis.  I've just finished reading a wonderful book called Remarkable Creatures by the London-based US writer, Tracy Chevalier (she also wrote Girl with a Pearl Earring, which I really loved, about the life of Vermeer).  

Mary Anning and the fossils of Lyme Regis

Dinosaurs at Musee des Science Naturelles

Remarkable Creatures brings to life the story of Mary Anning, Lyme Regis' most famous fossil collector and her close friend Elizabeth Philpot.   Anning came from a very lowly background and started off fossil-collecting as a child, earning money to keep her family out of the poorhouse.  She had an incredible talent for spotting and preparing fossil specimens and, as she gained more experience, she herself became a leading expert on the fossils she was collecting and selling - her advice was sought after by prominent geologists such as William Buckland and the Reverend William D Coneybeare. 

Of course, in the 19th century, the doors of Scientific institutions were completely closed to women, even more so to working-class women with no education and, towards the end of her life, Mary Anning felt aggrieved by the lack of recognition she'd received in a male-dominated world.  In her novel, Chevalier very cleverly explores the tensions between Anning and Philpot who, despite coming from different social classes, had an incredible friendship and united against the adversity they both faced, as women working in a new scientific field. 

The Englishmen who invented the Dinosaur

The work of Mary Annings and other scientists paved the way for the work of early palaeontologists such as Richard Owen and Gideon Algernon Mantell.  I mention Owen and Mantell in particular, as they had a rivalry which was every bit as fractious and intense, as the friendship between Annings and Philpot.  When I say the English 'invented' Dinosaurs, what I mean is that Owen and Mantell were amongst the first scientists who tried to conceptualise dinosaurs.  Considering how little material they had available to them at the time, the work of the first palaeontologists was both revolutionary and visionary.

Owen v Mantell

Richard Owen coined the word Dinosaur

Richard Owen first coined the word dinosaur from the Greek for terrible lizard in a publication in 1842.  The -saur part had already been used for the first specimen found by Mary Anning, the Icthyosaur or fish lizard.  Owen's conceptualisation of dinosaurs was of large, slow-moving, elephantine creatures that walked on four column-like legs.  This conceptualisation was popularised by his dinosaur models at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace in the 1850's.  Largely ignored by his contemporaries, Mantell's conceptualisation of large, fast-moving, two-legged creatures, turned out to be a more accurate conceptualisation, backed up by further fossil finds in later years.

Nowadays, thanks to a myriad of books and movies, an image of dinosaurs is well-and-truly imprinted on our minds.  It's hard for us to imagine the difficulty of trying to conceptualise what a dinosaur looked like, but it's worth bearing in mind that early palaeontologists were working with often incomplete fossils, pressed into rocks, with no obvious indication of what these creatures might look like, if they were stood upright.

The influence of Australia?

Something that really interested me, as I was researching all of this, was how the conceptualisation of dinosaurs co-incided with the colonisation of Australia and the 'discovery' of lots of new creatures, like the kangaroo which had never been seen by Europeans before.  Early examples of dinosaur skeletons were often juxtaposed with skeletons of Australian animals, like the wallaby and cassowary and I can't help wondering whether or not the physiognomy of these Australian animals influenced palaeontologists like Mantell, as they tried to conceptualise the stature of dinosaurs?

In his book, A Very Short Introduction to Dinosaurs (part of the OUP series), David Norman outlines the importance of paleobiology as a branch of palaeontology that can clearly inform, not only the stature of dinosaurs, but also their eating habits, sex and movement patterns. 

Dinosaurs and Darwin

It's also hard to imagine the societal attitude towards palaeontology at that time.  For many people in the 19th century, the idea that creatures existed before Noah's Ark was inconceivable.  Not only did the study of dinosaurs challenge the widely held belief in Bishop Ussher's biblical theory about the age of the Earth (ie. that the Earth was created on the 23rd of October 4004 BC!), but the idea that God would create life and then let it become extinct was considered sacrilegious.  The dinosaur debate fed into and supported Darwin's theory on Evolutionary gradualism, an even greater discussion that was to revolutionise 19th-century thought. 

Why are we so fascinated by dinosaurs?

Some dinosaurs were quite small!

Accepting the idea that God might let the dinosaurs become extinct, opened up the possibility that some day God might let humans become extinct.  A lot of the 19th-century anxiety around the study of dinosaurs was tied up in greater concerns about the fate of the human species.  Perhaps this goes some way to explaining the eternal fascination we have with dinosaurs.  Very few branches of science have captured the imagination more than the study of dinosaurs - what they were, what they looked like and what happened to make them 'suddenly' die out. 

It's also interesting to note how fascinated children are by dinosaurs.  As part of my research, I visited the famous Bernissart Iguanadons in the Musee des Sciences Naturelles in Brussels and I realised I'd never seen a reconstructed dinosaur before.  It's a fantastic place to bring children and their awe of dinosaurs reminded me that, even today, the conceptualisation of living dinosaurs requires a lot of imagination. 

Did dinosaurs have wings?

Dinosaurs and Dragons

I also think that there is something deep in the human psyche that 'remembers' a time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.  Of course, we know that this is impossible, dinosaurs became extinct long before the human species had evolved.  But how do we explain the stories of dragons and mythical beasts in many world cultures?  Isn't there something in our 'ancestral memory' that haunts our dreams and children's fairy tales?  It's quite apt that the English invented dinosaurs, a symbol of St George conquering his dragon!

Dinosaurs today

Something that I didn't know, before I started researching this topic, is that birds are believed to have evolved from dinosaurs!  Studies of bone structures show amazing similarities between dinosaurs and birds and it's quite possible that when the continents moved and the Earth flooded, dinosaurs simply became smaller and took to the skies to survive.  I don't think I'll ever look at birds in quite the same way again!

Image credits:

All photos were taken by me at the Musee des Sciences Naturelles in Brussels.  Please feel free to reuse these images under the Creative Commons license:

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