A museum located in Germany's scenic Neanderthal Valley, where
Neanderthals were first discovered, is giving people a chance to get a glimpse of a long-extinct relative.
In a museum in western Germany, a man in a fitted suit and dress shirt stands leaning on the railing and looks out over the gallery. A young girl lingers briefly beside him, and several visitors stop to stare. Something about this scene seems unusual.
This elegantly dressed gentleman has a large nose and sunken chin. "We call him Mr. Four Percent," says museum director Berbel Auffermann. "Since he's dressed in modern clothing, it's easy to overlook the secret of this lifelike statue - it's a Neanderthal."
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The statue conveys an important message - this ancient cave-dwelling hominid is actually not much different from humans. Indeed, genetic studies show that many humans have up to 4% Neanderthal DNA.
In fact, while scientists once believed that Neanderthals, whose fossils date back about 40000 years, were
brutally displaced by their slimmer hominid (human) relatives, they now believe that humans and Neanderthals overlapped for thousands of years until the Neanderthal population eventually disappeared.
The Neanderthal Museum is located 15 kilometers east of Dusseldorf, just a short walk from where the species was first discovered in the Neanderthal Valley in Germany in the 1850s.
Using stunningly realistic models, Ice Age artifacts, and easy-to-understand exhibits, the museum takes visitors on a four-million-year journey to the distant origins of humanity. A visit to the museum is not just an homage to paleoanthropology, but rather a journey to long-lost relatives.
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Since the
pandemic, interest in the museum has skyrocketed. In 2023, 180,000 Neanderthal fans came to the museum, the highest number of visitors since it opened in 1996, and according to Auffermann, visits to the museum will reach that number again this year. Meanwhile, an accelerating stream of scientific discoveries and the growing popularity of DNA analysis continue to fuel curiosity about fellow humans.
But despite their close kinship, Neanderthals have a serious image problem. According to Aufferman, most people think of this extinct group of ancient humans as nothing more than ignorant cavemen - brutes with a club. "From the beginning, we considered it our mission to correct that image. We always saw ourselves as their advocates, their representatives," she says.
In the past two years, the museum has opened a Stone Age-style playground with a cave and giant spear-shaped timbers supporting a slide and swings. It also opened a 22-meter observation tower overlooking the cave and an exhibit topped by a massive Neanderthal skull, which was nominated for the European Museum of the Year award in 2024.
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All this is happening against a backdrop of changing perceptions of Neanderthals. 400,000 years after their first appearance and 40,000 years after their extinction, the last 12 months have seen the publication of a raft of new documentaries, books and research on the species.
In addition to other new offerings, the museum will open a temporary exhibit on Nov. 23 on the role of women in Neanderthal society. Author Rebecca Ragg Sykes, whose book "Kindred: The Life, Love, Art, and Death of Neanderthals" became an international bestseller in 2020, narrates the accompanying audio tour. Drawing on research, Sykes will guide visitors through the lives of four ancient women who gave birth, raised children, hunted, and cared for their families.
Sykes, who is also leading a 10-day tour of Neanderthal sites in Europe, attributes the current fascination with the species to the 2010 sequencing of the
Neanderthal genome, which showed that the DNA of Neanderthals and modern humans is 99.7 percent identical.
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"It turned Neanderthal from someone who once existed and disappeared to someone who still exists now," she says. "People found it emotional. They said, 'I feel connected to a part of my past in an unexpected and very moving way'."
Research continues to expand understanding of the species. Researchers now know that they were highly sophisticated, making ropes, painting caves and caring for the injured and disabled, including - as one recent find revealed - children with Down syndrome.
"Neanderthals hunted the same animals we do.... The center of their social life, like ours, was the hearth," says Sykes.
People's first encounter with distant ancestors takes place just 400 meters from the museum, located in a forest where the Dussel River once flowed through a towering limestone canyon. Even now, this quiet, pastoral corner of industrialized western Germany seems an unlikely place that changed the way
humans think about evolution.
Like the Lake District in England and the Hudson Valley in New York, the Neanderthal Valley attracted Romantic artists in the early 1800s who were beckoned by its unspoiled picturesque landscapes. After sketching the landscapes, they would retreat to caves and rock shelters for picnics and parties.
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In the mid-1800s, as the
Industrial Revolution intensified, limestone became a valuable commodity for iron manufacturers, and masons began to be brought in from Italy to quarry the stone in the cliffs. In August 1856, workers began excavating clay caves and discovered 16 fossilized bones of a single man.
A local teacher and naturalist named Johann Carl Fullrott was called to the site and immediately felt the find was noteworthy. The remains indicated a stocky, powerful body, not unlike an ordinary human body. Fullrott and his colleague named the species after the valley where it was found: Homo neanderthalensis.
While Neanderthals are certainly the main attraction, the museum offers visitors a journey through the greatest milestones of human evolution.
The life-size figures are arranged in a timeline, including
Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), an ape-like ancestor that lived 3.2 million years ago and is often considered the "mother of mankind." It ranks alongside Homo erectus (a relative of humans who lived 1.6 million years ago) and Homo sapiens, a modern species that first appeared 300,000 years ago.
But the main star of the exhibition is "Mr. N," a statue that looks like a living Neanderthal. With his thick beard, massive jaw and stylish long hair, he resembles a prehistoric hipster. Crowds of visitors gather to take pictures with the figure, who seems to be grinning slyly.
Today, "Mr. N" is the de facto mascot of the museum, and he is so popular that he had to be replaced because his predecessor's skin weathered when too many visitors couldn't resist the opportunity to touch the past.
"He's kind of an identifying figure," Auffermann said. "He is very well liked by the people of the region."
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Outside the museum, the steep gorges that once beckoned artists have gradually been removed. Only one towering section of rock remains, on which a large metal plaque with Gothic letters commemorating the original discovery of the Neanderthal is mounted.
Just off the cliff is a path leading to the new observation tower at the edge of the forest. The wheelchair-accessible structure leads visitors along a circular path, interrupted by panels with a taped narrative. The climb culminates in a viewing platform where telescopes show a virtual reality landscape inhabited by mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses and Neanderthals.
The top of the tower is in roughly the same place and at the same elevation as the cave where humans first came face-to-face with distant relatives. "It's a bit like visiting your ancestor's grave," says Skais. "A giant tower with a skull on top. It's a way to allow people to be as close as possible to where the actual cave was. I think it's just wonderful."
Skais said each new find deepens understanding of the world and ourselves, and she expects interest in Neanderthals to grow.
"Neanderthals are interesting in their own right, not because they are relevant to us," she says. "Even if we never crossed paths with them, it's still interesting as another experiment in what it is to be human."