In August of 1908, a fossil human relative was discovered when a pickaxe struck the side of a skull. That fossil, which became known as the Old Man of La Chappelle, was sent to leading paleontologist Marcellin Boule in Paris for analysis. There, Boule described a brutish creature who was crude, unintelligent, shuffling, and hunched…
If you’ve been following along, you know I’ve been detailing the event of “Darwin’s Worst Nightmare” as it unfolded in 1858. First, Darwin received a letter that rocked his world (not in a good way), then he asked his friends to spring into action and help him preserve his scientific priority. Today, July 1st marks the final…
June 18th, 1858 was a rough day for Charles Darwin. On that day, he saw his worst nightmare unfold right in front of his eyes. “All my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed,” he wrote to a friend, fearing that his life’s work had collapsed. What caused this moment of panic? A…
Sir Richard Owen is often remembered for his massive row with Charles Darwin and Darwin’s followers over the theory of evolution through natural selection. Scientists like Thomas Huxley painted Owen as a backward creationist who didn’t conduct good science. But Owen was much more complex than that. Though he didn’t fully agree with Darwin’s version…
How to make sense of a skull Imagine this scenario: you are handed a skull. That’s all you’ve got, no other information. The skull is only partial, but it’s relatively large, approximately the size of a human skull. But it’s strange, it doesn’t look like any human skull you’ve ever seen. You examine its shape and notice it…
A Strange Skeleton The bones revealed a human of “extraordinary form,” he concluded. It was January 1857, and Hermann Schaaffhausen had just viewed a fossilized skeleton that was unlike anything he had ever seen. The surviving bits of the skeleton–made up of a partial skull, along with some leg bones, ribs, and other bits…
Who were the Neanderthals, and how were they related to humans? These are questions that have plagued paleoanthropologists since the first Neanderthal fossil was found over a century and a half ago. On July 11, 1997 a very important paper appeared in the journal Cell that shed light on this issue. It was titled “Neanderthal…
If you follow me on twitter (@FossilHistory) you may have seen I’ve been doing some writing outside of my blog. Today I wanted to share a piece I recently wrote for SAPIENS–but also I’d like to use this to briefly illuminate what it is I do as a historian of science, and why I think it’s the…
William King Gregory was a paleontologist who studied a variety of fossils creatures during the first half of the 20th century. He worked at the American Natural History Museum and Columbia University, and spent many years studying everything from fish to primates to human ancestors. Gregory introduced new approaches to examining fossils, helped settle human ancestor debates, and…
To a non-paleoanthropologist, the names Sterkfontein and Kromdraai may not mean much…but, that’s about to change. These are two limestone cave systems that make up the World Heritage Site known as the Cradle of Humankind. This South African site is the richest place for hominin fossils in the world. The sheer number of hominin fossils found at Sterkfontein and…
Fossil History 