[W]hen the headteacher Johann Karl Fuhlrott discovered the bones of a Neanderthal in a cave near Dusseldorf in 1856... Rudolf Virchow, President of the Deutsche Gessellschaft fur Anthropologie... who personally promoted the principle 'always practise honesty and stand by the facts whatever happens' -- endorsed the interpretation that the Neanderthal was a bow-legged, Mongolian Cossack with rickets, who had been lucky enough to survive multiple head injuries, but who, during a campaign b Russian forces against France in 1814, had been wounded, and (stark naked) had crawled into a cave, where he had died. Thirty years passed before the specialists recognised their mistake. [pp 288-289] |
