I enjoyed reading this post by Michael Balter on Science magazine's blog. He was writing about a talk he heard at the annual Calpe Conference, an event organised by Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum that brings together academics and boffins from around the world.
Balter, writing on a Darwin-themed blog, was intrigued by a talk given by Alex Menez, a Gibraltar pathologist who describes himself as "a bit of Darwin fan".
Darwin, we learn from him, was fascinated by a Neandertal skull fund in Gibraltar, the first such remains ever discovered. (It should have been Gibraltar man, not Neandertal man, but no one realised the significance at the time...)
As Balter writes, Menez found this out while mining the 14,500 letters written by and to Darwin available online as part of the Darwin Correspondence Project maintained by Cambridge University and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Go have a look.
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1 comments:
Brian, the story I hear is that it was a female skull not a male so Neanderthal Man should have been Gibraltar woman. However, one of the MH Bland tour guides, Tommy, has a tour in the German language and he mentions this fact. It may not be his original idea but he poses the rhetorical question. How did they know the skull was female and not male? Simple he goes on, the skull was found with it's mouth open. Not necessarily p.c. these days but the German tourists laugh like mad. Why spoil a good dit with the truth.
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