MAN FROM THE FARTHEST PAST 
recognizing its importance they threw it out with the 
earth; but the owner of the quarry on being told of the 
find urged the workmen to collect the fragments of the 
skeleton. Fourteen pieces were gathered and these were 
given soon after into the hands of Doctor Fuhlrott, of 
Elberfeld. 
They comprised the skullcap, the femora, humeri, 
ulnae, right radius, a portion of the left pelvic bone, part 
of the right scapula, a piece of the right clavicle, and five 
pieces of ribs. 
At the general meeting of the Natural History Society 
of the Prussian Rhineland and Westphalia, at Bonn, on 
June 2, 1857, Doctor Fuhlrott gave a full account of the 
locality of the find and of the circumstances under which 
the discovery was made. The principal details of his re- 
port were as follows: 
A small cave or grotto, high enough to admit a man and about 15 
feet deep from the entrance, which is 7 or 8 feet wide, exists in the 
southern wall of the gorge of the Neanderthal, as it is termed, at a 
distance of about 100 feet from the Diissel and about 60 feet above 
the bottom of the valley. In its earlier and uninjured condition this 
cavern opened upon a narrow plateau lying in front of it and from 
which the rocky wall descended almost perpendicularly to the river. 
It could be reached, though with difficulty, from above. The uneven 
floor was covered to a thickness of 4 or 5 feet with a deposit of mud, 
sparingly intermixed with rounded fragments of chert. In moving 
this deposit the bones were discovered. The skull was first noticed, 
placed nearest to the entrance of the cavern; and further in were 
the other bones lying in the same horizontal plane. Of this I was 
assured in the most positive terms by the two laborers who were em- 
ployed to clear out the grotto and who were questioned by me on 
the spot. At first no idea was entertained of the bones being human; 
and it was not till several weeks after their discovery that they were 
recognized as such by me and placed in security. But, as the impor- 
tance of the discovery was not at the time perceived, the laborers were 
very careless in the collecting and secured chiefly only the larger 
bones; and to this circumstance it may be attributed that fragments 
merely of the probably perfect skeleton came into my possession. 
Soon afterwards, in 1860, Sir Charles Lyell, the cele- 
brated English geologist and paleontologist, visited the 
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