By Marina Laura Sardi, Universidad Nacional de La Plata
This bust is inspired by the fossil recovered in 1856 in the Feldhofer cave, in the Neander Valley (Germany). It is one of the first Neanderthal specimens which informed the representation of the Cave Man in the imaginary of the 19th century. This fossil – vault fragments, with a great development of the supraorbital torus, and fragments of postcranial bones – intervened in the first controversy around human evolution in which transformist intellectuals disputed against those who adopted creationist and catastrophist perspectives. The former interpreted in this specimen a race antecedent to a period of the Germans and Celts; the second, a modern individual who suffered from some physical or mental disease that deformed his skull.
According to Brian Regal (2004), the images about life in prehistory had an immediacy and a power that rocks and fossils could not. Thus, museums included visual representations -scientific or supposedly scientific- about evolution, such as sculptures, drawings, paintings, and dioramas, sometimes derived from scientific spaces, or from spaces more linked to popular culture. They were destined to satisfy the interest of an audience curious to know phenomena distanced in time and space. Judith Berman (1999) suggests that an iconographic history was built around the Cave Man where characteristics such as the long and wild hair and the hairy body were visual signifiers that constituted our ancestors as “Not Us” or “Not Quite Us”, and those signifiers were associated with connotations of primitivism, animal behaviour, amorality, perversion, and madness; qualities also attributed to the natural world. The individual represented in the bust, in addition to the hirsute body, has a frown, red eyes, and shows his teeth, signs associated with aggressiveness and anger.

This sculpture (height of 54.6 cm) is housed at the División Antropología of the La Plata Museum (Argentina) and was exhibited for decades together with other plaster casts representing the Fossil Man. It was sold at the end of nineteenth century by the Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, in Rochester (United States) with a price of 7 (white) to 8 (bronzed) dollars. The Catalogue promotional text stated: “This bust is an ideal restoration, based upon the famous “Neanderthal skull,” found in 1857 in the Neanderthal, near Düsseldorf, Rhenish Prussia. Prof. Huxley says of the skull: “First, that its extraordinary form is due to a natural conformation hitherto not known to exist, even in the most barbarous races. Secondly, that it belongs to a period antecedent to the time of the Celts in Germany, and was in all probability derived from one of the wild races of north-western Europe. Thirdly, that it is beyond doubt traceable to a period at which the diluvium still existed.” As an effort to represent a Primitive Man, this bust is of interest to Archaeologists, and finds a very appropriate place over a case or cabinet of archaeological relics.” (p. 77).
Bibliography
Berman, Judith C. 1999. Bad Hair Days in the Paleolithic: Modern (Re)Constructions of the Cave Man. American Anthropologist. 101(2): 288-304.
Regal, Brian. 2004. Human evolution. A guide to the Debates. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, Inc.
Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, inc. 1893. Catalogue of human skeletons, human and comparative anatomical models, botanical models, busts and masks. 6th ed. Rochester, N.Y.: Ward’s Natural Science Establishment.