In a Word: Discovering Neanderthals

Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

Take a look at the chart of human evolution, and one of the first ancestor species you’ll find is the Neanderthals. Though they are thought to have died off around 40,000 years ago, the history of the name Neanderthal is much more recent.

It starts with a man named Joachim Neumann, who lived during the 17th century — after the close of both the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. Neumann wasn’t an archeologist, a historian, or a philosopher.

No, he was a German Protestant pastor and hymn-writer.

The renewed interest in ancient Greek and Roman writings that marked the Renaissance also gave rise to some fads among the educated. One such fad that continued for more than a century was the adoption a pseudonym constructed from Greek or Latin parts, often by directly translating one’s given name.

Take, for example, Johann Graumann and Johann Schneesing, two other German hymn writers who preceded Neumann. Graumann literally translates to “gray man”; in Greek, polios is “gray” and ander means “man,” and so Johann Graumann became Johann Poliander. Similarly, Schneesing (“snow-sing”) became Chiomusus by combining the Greek words for “snow” and “song.”

In the case of Joachim Neumann, his last name means “new man,” so he combined the Greek roots neo “new” and ander “man” and called himself Joachim Neander. You can still find the name Joachim Neander in some modern hymnals.

There was a particular valley (or Thal in the German of the time) just a few miles east of modern-day Düsseldorf that Neander often visited to find inspiration. He became so associated with the valley that people began referring to it as Neanderthal: “Neander’s valley.”

Fast-forward to 1856: The valley has become a quarry. Excavators working there discover fossilized, human-like bones in a Neander Valley cave called Kleine Feldhofer Grotto. Because of where the fossil was found, it was labeled Neanderthal 1.

When it was discovered, the creature was thought to be “lower race” of humans — based on the racial concepts of the time. But into the 20th century, as more specimens were uncovered and studied, they were ultimately labeled as a separate species — Homo neanderthalensis, or what we would call Neanderthals — which existed after Homo erectus and before the modern Homo sapiens.

While the Neander Valley specimen gets all the coverage, this wasn’t actually the first Neanderthal fossil to be found. Neanderthal fossils were discovered in Belgium in 1829 and Gibraltar in 1848, but it wasn’t until after the discovery of Neanderthal 1 that they realized what they had found.

Regardless, it’s pure coincidence that Neanderthals, a “new species of man” — is called by a name that means “new man’s valley.”