The most famous of these was the skullcap and associated bones discovered in 1856 in the “Little Feldhofer Grotto,” a limestone cave in the Neander Valley, near Dusseldorf in Germany. Even when Darwin wrote the Origin in 1858–1859, a handful of “antediluvian” human fossils was already known. Given which, it seems at the least a bit odd that in the entire two volumes of the first edition of the work only passing consideration at best is given to those fossils that might have given a historical embodiment to the notion of human emergence. But despite all this, early Victorian England remained a strait-laced Anglican society whose upper classes, well remembering events in France not so long before, had little taste for radical ideas in any field. The Reform Act of 1832 had witnessed significant changes in the way Parliament was elected the New Poor Law of 1834 had at least recognized problems in the system of poverty relief and the founding of London University in 1826 had provided, at last, a secular alternative to the fusty Anglican Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, during which Darwin’s most formative experiences all occurred, England was at one level a place of intense political and social ferment. First, and most famously, there was the intellectual and social milieu in which Darwin lived. There were undoubtedly multiple reasons for this neglect of the issue that was naturally enough in the back of everyone’s mind when reading The Origin, let alone The Descent of Man. He was, of course, most famously reticent on the matter in On The Origin of Species, noting himself in 1871 that his only mention of human origins had been one single throwaway comment, in his concluding section: Charles Darwin was curiously unforthcoming on the subject of human evolution as viewed through the fossil record, to the point of being virtually silent. As a result, in this bicentennial year when Darwin’s influence in every field of biology is being celebrated, it seems reasonable to look back at his relationship to paleoanthropology, a field that was beginning to take form out of a more generalized antiquarian interest just as Darwin was publishing On the Origin of Species in 1859.
Clearly, nobody seeking to understand human origins, any more than any other student of the history of life, can ignore our debt to these two men. Along with his younger colleague Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin provided the initial theoretical underpinnings of human evolutionary science as it is practiced today.
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