Station: [31] Neanderthals

During the last Ice Age, the Neanderthals, our cousins from the history of humanity, also trekked through Middle Franconia. They left traces in the Hohlen Fels near Happurg and in a cave called Petershöhle near Hartenstein... And in a collapsed cave near the hamlet of Hunas, a young Neanderthal even lost a tooth. Take a look at the display cases on your right to find out more.

Neanderthals were nomadic hunter-gatherers. Our figure represents a male hunter in the act of maintaining the weapon he uses for hunting. He’s wearing shoes, leggings attached to his belt, a smock and a hood made of deerskin, which would have been prepared using a vegetable tanning process. The garments are sewn with plied sinews. Our Neanderthal is wearing ornaments made of wolf's teeth, and a shell. When the temperature dropped, he probably wore fur garments, with the fur side facing either in or out.

He’s working on his spear, which is made of pine. The tool is a flint scraper bonded to a piece of birch wood with birch tar.

The shape of the man’s head and his stature are in line with skeletal finds of a late Neanderthal male from around 50,000 BC. He has a flat forehead and a blunt chin. The cheekbones are not very pronounced, and the back of his head juts out. He is 1.65 metres tall (so just over five foot four) and has a strong, barrel-shaped upper body and well-developed arm and leg muscles. In other words, he’s an archetypical Neanderthal male.

We don’t know what the exact cut of his clothing would have been, but there are footprints showing that shoes were worn. Tool finds include scrapers and smoothers for leather as well as awls. The spear is based on a find from Lower Saxony; its use can be traced back to Homo erectus. The ornaments correspond to finds from France. And the scraper is documented by evidence from North Rhine-Westphalia.