How Do Scientists Identify New Species? For Neanderthals, It Was All About Timing and Luck
Even the most remarkable fossil find means nothing if scientists aren’t ready to see it for what it is
By Lorraine Boissoneault
smithsonian.com
May 9, 2018 1:17PM
But there was something strange about it. The cavernous eye sockets sat beneath a bulging brow ridge; the domed roof seemed more oblong and less rounded than a human’s. Yet when Lieutenant Edmund Flint presented the skull to the Gibraltar Scientific Society the only note made by that group was where the so-called “human skull†was found—in Forbes’ Quarry. This was 1848, more than a decade before Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species would first suggest that new species could evolve from other species—even humans.
Read more:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-neanderthals-got-their-name-180968912/#r58eheu2hV5oQBk6.99
