Themes > Science > Life Sciences > Physical Anthropology > Pre-Historic Man > Hominid Species Timeline > Homo sapiens neandertalensis: Forcing a radical reconsideration of human origins

The skull cap, left, found in the Neander valley of Germany in 1857, was one of the first fossil finds of early humans that forced a radical reconsideration of human origins. Since the remains were found two years before Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published, scholars had no way of accounting for the discovery or explaining its meaning.

The Neanderthals remain something of a mystery in the story of human descent. Scientists still debate whether they are a closely related sub-species of modern humans or represent a collateral line of late Homo erectus, related to but not ancestral to modern humans. Below are two artists' depictions of Neanderthal life in ice-age Europe.

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