Cindy Hsin-yee Huang at Sapiens Magazine:
In 1888, a few decades after the first scientifically named Homo neanderthalensis fossil surfaced, anthropologist and anatomist Hermann Schaaffhausen made a portrait of what that Neanderthal might have looked like in life.
Found in Germany’s Neander Valley, the actual fossil was just the top of a skull—a teardrop-shaped dome fronted by big brows—without the facial bones below. But Schaafhausen filled in the blanks and sketched a Neanderthal visage in profile: a hairy, husky fellow with a protruding jaw. Eighteen years earlier, scientist Louis Figuier published an illustration that depicted the Neander Valley individual as a biologically modern, fur-clad European. From the same fossil, two contemporaries drew diametrically opposed images.
Why did this happen?
more here.
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