Tour the Castle's Top Floor After its First Fifty Years

This skull, found in 1857 in a limestone cave in the Neanderthal, near Dusseldorf, Rhenish Prussia, is one of the most famous of human relies, and probably no single fossil has created such a sensation in the scientific world. It is the most ape-like of human skulls.

Professor Huxley says of this skull: First, that its extraordinary form is due to a natural conformation, hitherto not known to exist, even in the most barbarous races; secondly, that it belongs to a period antecedent to the time of the Celts in Germany, and was in all probability derived from one of the wild races of northwestern Europe, and thirdly, that it is beyond doubt traceable to a period at which the diluvium still existed. As a representative of primitive man, therefore, this skull, of which a perfect cast can be seen in the Museum, is of the greatest interest to anthropologists.

Return to start of the Top Floor of the Castle's Main Hall in 1886