Hermann Schaaffhausen
Hermann Schaaffhausen ( born July 19, 1816 in Koblenz, † January 26, 1893 in Bonn ) was a German anthropologist.
Life
Study
Hermann Schaaffhausen - son of businessman Hubert Josef Schaaffhausen and Anna Maria Wachendorf from Koblenz - studied medicine at Berlin and Bonn before he habilitated in 1844 and was appointed professor at the University of Bonn the same year. He taught the subjects of physiology and anthropology.
Schaaffhausen and Neanderthals
1857 examined Schaaffhausen together with the anatomist Franz Josef Karl Mayer later the bones of Neanderthal 1 mentioned holotype of Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis ) and reported for the first time on February 4, 1857 a meeting of the Lower Rhine Society for Nature and Medicine in Bonn about it. There he exhibited a plaster cast of the skullcap found by Johann Carl Fuhlrott in the Neander Valley near Mettmann. In the winter of 1857 Fuhlrott himself traveled to Bonn, to pass its fossils there in person. Mayer it was likely the branched metal deposits, known as dendrites, found on the bones. This indicated his view point to a great age. Mayer could be in the following period of disease-related reasons, no longer worry about the finds and left Schaaffhausen further evaluation. The compared them with various Neolithic finds from Mecklenburg, with whom he " with probability ... a raw primitive people " attributed to, " ... which inhabited northern Europe from the Germans ... had a wide circulation ... , and was related to the indigenous people of Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia ... ". However, unlike Fuhlrott Schaaffhausen was not ready to concede the Fund a glacial age.
Especially Rudolf Virchow denied, however, that it is the finding of a fossil man, a breakfast RELATES people and believed that the particular shape of the bone is caused by a disease rickets. It is thanks to Hermann Schaaffhausen that the skeleton was not sold to England, but painting is still owned by the Rheinische Landesmuseum. In 1889 he was made an honorary member of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory.
Co-founder of the Rhenish State Museum
Schaaffhausen can be seen as an important founders of modern physical anthropology. This applies to both special sub-areas of the discipline, such as paleoanthropology, as well as the institutionalization of science in society. He was co-founder of the German Society of Anthropology and co-editor of the journal Archives of Anthropology.
The defense of the Neanderthal as a special human form cost him his academic career: he remained, despite many petitions to the Ministry, until his 50th anniversary doctoral associate professor, ie without a seat and vote in the faculty.
Schaaffhausen was co-founder of the Rhenish State Museum. He lived in a spacious villa at Honnef, Bad Honnef today, which still exists today and was bequeathed by Schaaffhausen death of his daughter, the Archdiocese of Cologne. Prince Wilhelm of Prussia was there during his Bonn study time often attended and occasionally lived there. In 1876, he planted himself the " Emperor oak " in the garden of the villa. After Schaaffhausen wife Anna, the Anna valley was named in the Seven Mountains, where he built the so-called Roman source for the irrigation of his villa.
1893 Hermann Schaaffhausen died in Bonn. His grave is in the Old Cemetery.
Publications
- About resistance and transformation of species. In: Proceedings of the Natural History Society. Bonn 1853
- For the knowledge of the oldest breed skull ( " Neanderthal skull "). In: Müller's archive. 1858
- About the archetype of the human skull. Bonn 1869
- The anthropological questions of the present. In: Archives of Anthropology. 1868
- About the method of prehistoric research. In: Archives of Anthropology. 1871
- The skull of Raphael. In: Archives of Anthropology. 1883
- Anthropological studies. In: Archives of Anthropology. 1885
- The Neanderthal Fund. In: Archives of Anthropology. 1888