A fossilized skeleton discovered in 1856 presented naturalists with a unique challenge. The strange, human-looking bones of the first recognized Neanderthal confronted naturalists with a new type of object for which they had no readily available interpretive framework. This paper explores the techniques and approaches used to understand these bones in the years immediately following the discovery, in particular 1856–1864. Historians have previously suggested that interpretations and debates about Neanderthals hinged primarily on social, political and cultural ideologies. In this paper, (...) I will argue that much of the scientific controversy surrounding the first recognized Neanderthal centred on questions of methodology and practice, and will demonstrate this through an exploration of the tools and approaches naturalists utilized in their examinations of the fossils. This will contribute to a growing historical recognition of the complex exchange between disciplines including geology, archaeology and comparative anatomy in the early study of fossil hominins, and provide a future framework for histories of Neanderthal debates in the twentieth century. (shrink)

Fossils have been traded for centuries. Over the past two hundred years the market has developed into an organized enterprise, with fossils serving multiple functions as objects of scientific study, collectors' items, and investments. Finding fossils, digging them up or purchasing them, transporting, studying, and conserving them, and putting them on display was and still is expensive. Since the early nineteenth century, funding bodies, academic institutions and museums, philanthropists, dealers, collectors, amateurs, and professional paleontologists have constituted elaborate networks driven by (...) collaboration, necessity, ambition, accolades, and capital to generate knowledge and produce geological artifacts, increasing our understanding of the natural world, advancing careers and institutions, and contributing to personal fortunes. The emergence of paleoanthropology as a scientific discipline around 1900 generated a scientific focus on the human story that was easy to sell. The scarcity of ancient human remains made it close to impossible for a commercial market to evolve, yet finding them required serious funding. Elaborate schemes for financing expeditions and excavations went hand in hand with individual aspirations, patronage, philanthropy, networks, and alliance building, as concession rights and access to sponsors were objects of regular political intrigues and often bitter disputes. (shrink)

By the early twentieth century there was a growing need within palaeoanthropology and prehistoric archaeology to find a way of dating fossils and artefacts in order to know the age of specific specimens, but more importantly to establish an absolute chronology for human prehistory. The radiocarbon and potassium–argon dating methods revolutionized palaeoanthropology during the last half of the twentieth century. However, prior to the invention of these methods there were attempts to devise chemical means of dating fossil bone. Collaborations between (...) Emile Rivière and Adolphe Carnot in the 1890s led to the development of the fluorine dating method, but it was not until the 1940s that this method was improved and widely implemented by Kenneth Oakley to resolve a number of problems in palaeoanthropology, including the Piltdown Man controversy. The invention of the fluorine dating method marked a significant advance in the quest for absolute dating in palaeoanthropology, but it also highlights interesting problems and issues relating to the ability of palaeoanthropologists and chemists to bring together different skills and bodies of knowledge in order successfully to develop and apply the fluorine dating method. (shrink)

Although he died in obscurity, the Belgian museum conservator Aimé Rutot was one of the most famous European archaeologists between 1900 and 1920. The focus of his scientific interest was stone flints, which he claimed to be the oldest known human tools, so‐called eoliths. Skeptics maintained that the flints showed no marks of human workmanship, but Rutot nevertheless managed to spread his “Eolithic theory” in an important part of the scientific community. This essay demonstrates how material objects—series of stone flints (...) and sets of statues that purported to reconstruct prehistoric “races”—were given scientific meaning by Rutot. Rutot diffused his ideas by disseminating his stones and statues, thus enlarging his networks of influence. For a time he managed to be at the material center of a trade network as well as at the intellectual center of archaeological debate. The essay shows how Rutot achieved this status and how he eventually fell from favor among serious scientists. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Evolution cartoons served polemical and satirical purposes even before Darwin published On the Origin of Species, and they proliferated afterward. Yet even though Victorian evolution cartoons often pictured Darwin himself as a personification of his theory, by the time of the Scopes trial controversy in the 1920s cartoons about evolution had come to popularize ironically non‐Darwinian views of evolution. Cartoons repeated, reflected, and perpetuated teleological views of evolution and often implicitly associated evolution with prevalent attitudes about race, gender, and (...) social hierarchies. Cartoons drew on old iconographic traditions, expanding them to fit changing historical circumstances, forming a lasting cartoon lexicon. Though adaptable and protean, the language of evolution cartoons, like any language, carries its history with it, and in them we can read the history of the cultural context of evolution controversies. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Evolution cartoons served polemical and satirical purposes even before Darwin published On the Origin of Species, and they proliferated afterward. Yet even though Victorian evolution cartoons often pictured Darwin himself as a personification of his theory, by the time of the Scopes trial controversy in the 1920s cartoons about evolution had come to popularize ironically non‐Darwinian views of evolution. Cartoons repeated, reflected, and perpetuated teleological views of evolution and often implicitly associated evolution with prevalent attitudes about race, gender, and (...) social hierarchies. Cartoons drew on old iconographic traditions, expanding them to fit changing historical circumstances, forming a lasting cartoon lexicon. Though adaptable and protean, the language of evolution cartoons, like any language, carries its history with it, and in them we can read the history of the cultural context of evolution controversies. (shrink)

This paper identifies ‘savage numbers’ – number-like or number-replacing concepts and practices attributed to peoples viewed as civilizationally inferior – as a crucial and hitherto unrecognized body of evidence in the first two decades of the Victorian science of prehistory. It traces the changing and often ambivalent status of savage numbers in the period after the 1858–1859 ‘time revolution’ in the human sciences by following successive reappropriations of an iconic 1853 story from Francis Galton's African travels. In response to a (...) fundamental lack of physical evidence concerning prehistoric men, savage numbers offered a readily available body of data that helped scholars envisage great extremes of civilizational lowliness in a way that was at once analysable and comparable, and anecdotes like Galton's made those data vivid and compelling. Moreover, they provided a simple and direct means of conceiving of the progressive scale of civilizational development, uniting societies and races past and present, at the heart of Victorian scientific racism. (shrink)