Johann Carl Fuhlrott
Encyclopedia
Prof. Dr. Johann Carl Fuhlrott was born December 31, 1803 in Leinefelde, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

, and died October 17, 1877 in Elberfeld
Elberfeld
Elberfeld is a municipal subdivision of the German city of Wuppertal; it was an independent town until 1929.-History:The first official mentioning of the geographic area on the banks of today's Wupper River as "elverfelde" was in a document of 1161...

, (Wuppertal
Wuppertal
Wuppertal is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is located in and around the Wupper river valley, and is situated east of the city of Düsseldorf and south of the Ruhr area. With a population of approximately 350,000, it is the largest city in the Bergisches Land...

). He is famous for recognizing the significance of the bones of Neanderthal 1
Neanderthal 1
Feldhofer 1, Neanderthal 1 is the common name for the initial 40,000-year-old Neanderthal specimen found in Kleine Feldhofer Grotte in August 1856. It represents the beginning of paleoanthropology as a scientific discipline....

, a Neanderthal specimen discovered by German laborers who were digging for limestone in Neander valley (Neanderthal in German) in August 1856. Originally disregarded, Fuhlrott, to his eternal credit, had the insight to recognize them for what they were: the remains of a previously unknown type of human. His parents were the innkeeper Johannes Philipp Fuhlrott and his wife Maria Magdalena, née Nussbaum. His parents had died by the time he was ten and he was raised by his uncle, the Catholic
Catholic
The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...

 priest Carl Bernhard Fuhlrott in Seulingen. In 1835 he married Josepha Amalia Kellner (1812–1850), with whom he had six children.

After studying mathematics and natural sciences at the University of Bonn
University of Bonn
The University of Bonn is a public research university located in Bonn, Germany. Founded in its present form in 1818, as the linear successor of earlier academic institutions, the University of Bonn is today one of the leading universities in Germany. The University of Bonn offers a large number...

, Fuhlrott became a teacher at the Gymnasium
Gymnasium (school)
A gymnasium is a type of school providing secondary education in some parts of Europe, comparable to English grammar schools or sixth form colleges and U.S. college preparatory high schools. The word γυμνάσιον was used in Ancient Greece, meaning a locality for both physical and intellectual...

 in Elberfeld. In 1856, workers in a lime
Lime (mineral)
Lime is a general term for calcium-containing inorganic materials, in which carbonates, oxides and hydroxides predominate. Strictly speaking, lime is calcium oxide or calcium hydroxide. It is also the name for a single mineral of the CaO composition, occurring very rarely...

 quarry in the nearby canyon called Gesteins or Neandertal(southwest of Mettmann
Mettmann
Mettmann is a Rhenish town in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is the administrative centre of the district of Mettmann, Germany's most densely populated rural district...

) showed him bones they had found in a cave and thought to belong to a bear. Fuhlrott identified them as human
Human
Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...

 and thought them to be very old. He recognized them to be different from the usual bones of humans and showed them to the Professor of Anatomy
Anatomy
Anatomy is a branch of biology and medicine that is the consideration of the structure of living things. It is a general term that includes human anatomy, animal anatomy , and plant anatomy...

 at the University of Bonn, Hermann Schaaffhausen
Hermann Schaaffhausen
Hermann Schaaffhausen studied medicine in University of Berlin and received his doctor degree in 1839, and became a Professor of Anatomy at the University of Bonn. Schaaffhausen is credited with identifying the remains of Neanderthal 1...

. Together they announced the discovery publicly in 1857. In their view the bones represented the remnants of an ancient human race, different from contemporary humans. Their views were not readily accepted as it contradicted literal interpretations of the Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

, and Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

's work about evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

 had not yet been published. Today, Fuhlrott and Schaaffhausen are considered to be the founders of paleoanthropology
Paleoanthropology
Paleoanthropology, which combines the disciplines of paleontology and physical anthropology, is the study of ancient humans as found in fossil hominid evidence such as petrifacted bones and footprints.-19th century:...

, and the genus they discovered is referred to as Homo neanderthalensis
Neanderthal
The Neanderthal is an extinct member of the Homo genus known from Pleistocene specimens found in Europe and parts of western and central Asia...

in honor of the site where it was first identified.

See also


External links

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