Human evolution and national identity

Historical studies of the relationship between human biology and European culture and politics habitually focus on racial hierarchies, eugenics, and genocide (Turda and Weindling Reference Turda and Weindling2007; Neumann Reference Neumann1998; Smedley Reference Smedley1998; McMahon Reference McMahon2009; Kohli Reference Kohli2000; Jahoda Reference Jahoda2009; Bashford and Levine Reference Bashford and Levine2010; Broberg and Roll-Hansen Reference Broberg and Roll-Hansen2005). Richard McMahon, for instance, has argued that national races helped to naturalize and reinforce alliances and enmities, linking specific nationalities to attractive races like the Nordic in order to claim racial nobility in or other cases to justify colonial possessions (McMahon Reference McMahon2009, 577). As these issues are of extreme importance in understanding crucial and darker aspects of European history, especially in the twentieth century, they have eclipsed a highly significant link between studies of human evolution and the making of a European identity. Palaeoanthropological and archaeological findings and theories, and the changing perspectives on how Europeans in different countries have seen themselves, have thus largely escaped historical treatment.Footnote ¹ The example of Homo garderensis provides a case in point to understand how deeply rooted local cultural influences have been on the interpretation of scientific data in the discussions of human prehistory.

In the nineteenth century, fossil remains of ancient humans were found in Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, and Spain. Through this, and the discovery of a growing number of cultural artefacts and examples of cave art, a new sense of prehistory was established with profound implications for how the peoples of Europe saw themselves and everybody else around the world. While spectacular hominin fossil finds in Africa and Asia dominated the discussions of the origin of humankind during the twentieth century, Europe continued to be a center of scientific and popular interest with regard to so-called modern humans (Roebroeks Reference Roebroeks2001; Roebroeks and Kolfschoten Reference Roebroeks and van Kolfschoten1995).Footnote ² As palaeoanthropology and archaeology grew into well-established research disciplines at European universities, fossil finds and archaeological evidence were used in making competing claims for the first Europeans. These claims went far beyond transnational scientific interests and tied into national, cultural, and political discussions while the first Briton, the First German, the first Frenchman, and so on, were promoted and often hailed as the long sought missing link to our evolutionary past.Footnote ³

The cultural impact of the reading of fossil finds was massive. No one in Britain raised an eyebrow when further findings in Piltdown in the early twentieth century exceptionally supplied the infamous Eoanthropus dawsonii, better known as the Piltdown Man, with something that looked mostly like a cricket bat. Of course one would expect the first Briton to have played cricket, the general assumption ran, demonstrating how human evolution, prehistory, science, culture, self-importance, and national identity were intertwined (Dawson and Woodward Reference Dawson and Woodward1915; Spencer Reference Spencer1990; Woodward Reference Woodward1948). Equally in Denmark, the Nobel laureate in literature, Johannes V. Jensen eagerly supported a view that modern humans descended from noble Neanderthals and that evidence was still found in contemporary Danes, notably in the anthropological type “Anholt man,” based upon the physical characteristics of inhabitants of the small Danish island Anholt. Hans Christian Andersen's physical appearance was also seen as evidence for the Danish claim to ancestral authenticity and a direct Scandinavian link to evolutionary prehistory, marking a departure for a more general claim than restricting contemporary vestiges to islanders of Anholt. Indeed, Jensen enthusiastically reported,

To Jensen, Hans Christian Andersen's value as a national treasure deepened as his creative genius was thought to have peculiar and noble evolutionary roots (Bravo Reference Bravo, Bravo and Sörlin2002; Duedahl Reference Duedahl and Kjærgaard2006; Gjerløff Reference Gjerløff2004; Jensen Reference Jensen1923 and 1941). In the Anholt type example, little attention was paid to ignorance or complete neglect from the international research community. What really mattered was the national and regional context.

An abundance of hominin fossils and skeletal remains have produced similar local interpretations across Europe projecting national virtues and prejudices onto scientific, cultural, and political narratives. Surprisingly little has changed in that regard in the last half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century as palaeoanthropological research has grown more organized and large-scale research projects have been established in Europe and neighboring countries such as excavations in Gibraltar, Greenland, Mount Carmel in Israel, Dmanisi in Georgia, Atapuerca in Spain, and the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project (Finlayson Reference Finlayson2009; Stringer Reference Stringer2006; Arsuaga Reference Arsuaga2002; Weinstein-Evron Reference Weinstein-Evron2009). In all of these cases questions of national, European, and human identity have been central to scientific interpretation, communication and funding.Footnote ⁴Homo gardarensis serves as an example of how scientific findings and theories have influenced popular understanding of cultural identity, and how national and cultural pride have shaped the interpretation of scientific data and competition between rival explanations.Footnote ⁵

Scandinavian ancestors

Scandinavian prehistory and candidates for Scandinavian ancestors in the nineteenth and early twentieth century were instrumental in negotiating national identities influenced by a combination of written sources, archaeological evidence, cranial measurements, ethnographical studies, prejudices, Viking heritage, and the construction of a unique Nordic genetic nobility combined with an acute awareness of being on the fringes of Europe. Compared to other north European countries in the early twentieth century like Germany, France, and Britain, the study of early humans at the foot of the evolutionary tree in Scandinavia did not achieve the same kind of professionalization and disciplinary maturity (Bennike and Bonde Reference Bennike and Bonde1992; Cederlund Reference Cederlund2011; Fischer and Kristiansen Reference Fischer and Kristiansen2002; Gräslund Reference Gräslund1987; Graves-Brown-Paul, Jones, and Gamble Reference Graves-Brown-Paul and Gamble1996; Kristiansen Reference Kristiansen and Daniel1981 and 2011; Kyllingstad Reference Kyllingstad2012; Moberg Reference Moberg1981; Scott Reference Scott1996; Trigger Reference Trigger1984 and 2002).Footnote ⁶ To some degree this might seem paradoxical considering the formative international position eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scandinavian scholars had in terms of taxonomy with Carl Linnaeus, archaeological nomenclature for classifying and studying prehistoric societies with Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, excavating prehistoric human remains with Peter Wilhelm Lund, and introducing kitchen middens as a way to study prehistoric daily lives with Johan Georg Forchhammer, Japetus Steenstrup, and Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae (Kjærgaard Reference Kjærgaard, Siegmund-Schulze and Sørensen2006 and 2008; Koerner Reference Koerner1999; Rowley-Conwy Reference Rowley-Conwy2007; Holten and Sterll Reference Holten and Sterll2000). Theoretically, this was linked to a reluctance among leading scholars such as Steenstrup, a professor of zoology at the University of Copenhagen, to include an evolutionary framework to account for human ancestry and a reliance on one's own theoretical constructions (Gregersen and Kjærgaard Reference Gregersen and Kjærgaard2009; Kjærgaard and Gregersen 2006; Kjærgaard, Gregersen, and Hjermitslev 2008). But there were other institutional and sociological reasons for this.

While interest in human prehistory remained and archaeology was consolidated as a scientific discipline in its own right with institutions, museums, and publications, the deep evolutionary history of humanity was of little consequence or influence. To some extent the nineteenth-century Scandinavian intellectual communities maintained a self-contained professional culture. As Latin faded as the Lingua franca of modern academia, the vernacular gradually took its place. Publications and training of new generations were mainly fulfilling local and national purposes, and served regional audiences in the nineteenth century. For that purpose the Scandinavian languages were better suited than English, German, or French, neither of which were yet serious contenders in publications and public presentation of scientific discussions and results. A scientific vocabulary in physics, chemistry, archaeology, and anthropology was invented to manage locally what was debated internationally (Kjærgaard Reference Kjærgaard, Kragh, Kjærgaard, Nielsen and Nielsen2008; Kragh et al. Reference Kragh, Kjærgaard, Nielsen and Nielsen2008). Consequently, as the scientific development in the major European countries were mirrored in terms of focus, topics, problems, methods, means, results and outlets, and while anthropological initiatives were inspired by what was going on elsewhere, it made little mark on university structures. Positions were mainly within already existing departments and few chairs were created with the explicit purpose of studying human cultural and biological prehistory. This did not mean, however, that Scandinavians were indifferent to especially their own Scandinavian prehistory. Although archaeologists continued to be interested in learning about how people had lived in the past and in cultural evolution, their main concern was working out cultural chronologies to shed light on their own region's prehistory and thus provide a repository of cultural pride and deeply rooted national identity (Trigger Reference Trigger2002, 214; Fischer and Kristiansen Reference Fischer and Kristiansen2002).

Except for Lund's excavations at Lagoa Santa in Brazil in the 1830s and 1840s that included fossil human remains even at the time dated to be very old, and the Swedish geologist Johan Gunnar Andersson's involvement in the discovery of the Peking Man, the general scientific focus was on Scandinavia and Scandinavian possessions, which held too little ancient human skeletal material to inspire interest in humanity's deep evolutionary past (Frängsmyr Reference Frängsmyr2006; Holten and Sterll Reference Holten and Sterll2000). As with other European countries Scandinavian collections reflect former colonies and geographic regions where political power and financial interest went hand in hand. As it were, none of these places contained fossil bearing strata containing hominins. There was thus little to work on for palaeoanthropology to grow as a discipline. Instead anatomists directed their interest more towards physical anthropological studies, in particular cranial measurements within a framework aimed at determining the origin of the “Nordic race.” From the archaeological and craniological stage in the nineteenth century with emphasis on racial origins, studies of biological anthropology in Scandinavia evolved into a eugenic line, feeding political racism on the one hand and genetic science on the other, and an osteological line, including more traditional physical anthropology and palaeopathology (Bennike and Bonde Reference Bennike and Bonde1992; Bennike Reference Bennike and Spencer1997; Holck Reference Holck and Spencer1997a and Reference Holck and Spencer1997b; Björkman and Widmalm Reference Björkman and Widmalm2010; Koch Reference Koch1996 and 2000).

The political, intellectual, and cultural history of the Nordic countries play an important part in the construction of regional identities and particular scientific interests in general (Kjærgaard Reference Kjærgaard, Siegmund-Schulze and Sørensen2006; Drivenes, Jølle, and Zachariasson Reference Drivenes, Jølle and Zachariasson2004; Frängsmyr Reference Frängsmyr2000; Kragh et al. Reference Kragh, Kjærgaard, Nielsen and Nielsen2005–2006 and 2008; Trigger Reference Trigger2002). This was also reflected in a discussion of a uniquely Nordic character confronting and eventually appropriating Darwinian ideas of human evolution (Gregersen and Kjærgaard Reference Gregersen and Kjærgaard2009; Hjermitslev Reference Hjermitslev2011; Kjærgaard and Gregersen 2006; Kjærgaard, Gregersen, and Hjermitslev Reference Kjærgaard, Gregersen, Hjermitslev, Engels and Glick2008). Thus, the cultural, historical, and archaeological search for the Nordic type began prior to and independently from evolutionary theory. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, these frameworks merged and the many craniological data were often, but not exclusively, reinterpreted in an evolutionary perspective that fit the idea and self-image of noble and quite distinct Nordic ancestors.

The effect of this type of thinking was not a mere Scandinavian issue, but served as the basis for racial biology and racist ideologies in Europe and North America (Bashford and Levine Reference Bashford and Levine2010; Lipphardt Reference Lipphardt2012 and 2013; Ballantyne Reference Ballantyne2001; Kyllingstad Reference Kyllingstad2012; Livingstone Reference Livingstone2010; Selcer Reference Selcer2012; Smedley Reference Smedley1998; Watkins Reference Watkins2012). The merger of different kinds of data from different scientific fields was reflected, for example, in Beatrice Louise Stevenson's ambitious attempt to draw sociology and physical anthropology together in what she termed socio-anthropometry at the beginning of the twentieth century. Basing her physical comparisons on the contemporary standards of anthropological studies – hair, skin, eyes, stature and head index – and following the “racial maps” of Europe by Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Joseph Denniker, William Z. Ripley, and John Beddoe among others, Stevenson evoked a grand narrative of the “Teutonic race” in the physical, cultural, and political history of Britain and Scandinavia.Footnote ⁷ Although a mixture coming from a long history of invasions, the influx of Nordic blood was what made Britain great, she claimed. Two strains, the Saxon and the Nordic, had dominated English life and character. But while the Saxon strain was expressed in love of home, agriculture, obedience to the law and the democratic principle, the Norman strain showed itself in “love of personal liberty, of adventure, of fine quality and truthful virtues, and the aristocratic principle” (Stevenson Reference Stevenson1916, 20). While these qualities had the benefit of being mixed with other strains in Britain, they were indicative of an immaturity and incompleteness in the Scandinavian nations. “Viking raids were not followed up by constructive effort,” Stevenson argued,

Stevenson had no doubt that these sharp contrasts had played a large role “in the formation of Scandinavia as a racial unit,” but added that “definite knowledge of Scandinavia's racial origin is however lacking” (Stevenson Reference Stevenson1916, 26). Two strains were still present in the Scandinavian populations: the Cro-Magnon or so-called dolichocephalic and the so-called brachycephalic types. Neanderthals may have been the foundational type, Stevenson speculated, but held that it remained unknown. The Nordic type was fair-haired, blue eyed, long of head, and tall of stature, adventurous and determined. But however promising, this was not enough to conquer the world. Ultimately the Scandinavian nations failed to use the full potential of their anthropological advantages.

Even less flattering was William Ripley's description in The Races of Europe published in 1899. “The northwestern corner of Europe, including Scandinavia Denmark, and the Baltic plain of Germany, throughout the prehistoric period,” he concluded, “has been characterized by backwardness of culture compared with the rest of Europe” (Ripley Reference Ripley1899, 507). The cultural artefacts were of such poor quality that Ripley did not allow for any cultural evolution in the Nordic region. Everything of any advanced nature had to have been introduced from the south by others. The Scandinavians had accomplished little more than staying stubbornly in a harsh and unwelcoming climate.

While biometric data on the population in the Nordic countries, including the possessions, were meticulously recorded and published, such characteristics did not fit the ideas of cultural and national identity and a predominant belief in a special noble Nordic ancestry (Kyllingstad Reference Kyllingstad2012; Kyllingstad Reference Kyllingstad2004; Ljungström Reference Ljungström2003). While setting out to identify the “racial types” in Denmark in the early twentieth century, Hans Peder Steensby, who later became professor of geography at the University of Copenhagen, traveled to remote areas of the country. His work was based on the assumption that the population there had lived in isolation long enough to have retained some of the original features of the first peoples populating the area. These were the standard features checked for in contemporary anthropology: hair, eyes, skin, head, and stature. Much to Steensby's surprise his findings did not produce the standard Teutonic blue-eyed, fair-haired, tall, dolichocephalic person, but rather the opposite: people with protruding brow ridges, flat foreheads, crooked noses, and dark skin and hair. The explanation for this was sought in an original Neanderthal population. That was not something to worry about, however. Steensby was of the opinion that Neanderthals should not be viewed as an extinct species, but rather as a specific human race. His findings concluded that, contrary to what was commonly believed by anthropologists, Neanderthals’ traits lived on in the current population of isolated pockets around and in Denmark.

In Man's Place in Nature, published in 1863, Thomas Henry Huxley had dismissed Neanderthals as a candidate for a Missing Link between apes and humans. Steensby found support in his findings from Huxley's subsequent brief analysis suggesting that the skull found in Neanderthal in Germany bore a striking resemblance to stone-age skulls found in Borreby on the Danish island Funen. To Huxley it was a likely scenario that the Borreby skulls represented the original population in Denmark, presumed to be the makers of the famous Danish kitchen middens (Huxley Reference Huxley1863, 157–159; Kjærgaard Reference Kjærgaard, Siegmund-Schulze and Sørensen2006). The Danish zoologist Japetus Steenstrup, who was among the group of experts first to excavate kitchen middens and a non-Darwinian, persistently denied co-existence of humans and extinct animals. Thus ruling out the idea of very ancient humans, his kitchen midden people were as advanced as the first Europeans. The Borreby skull was elevated to a type description by the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow following the International Archaeology Congress in Copenhagen in 1869. After the Congress Virchow studied 41 Danish stone-age skulls and while describing them as sturdy, brachycephalic, with prominent brow ridges, he termed them the Borreby type (Bennike and Bonde Reference Bennike and Bonde1992; Kjærgaard Reference Kjærgaard, Kragh, Kjærgaard, Nielsen and Nielsen2008; Kjærgaard and Gregersen 2006; Kjærgaard, Gregersen, and Hjermitslev Reference Kjærgaard, Gregersen, Hjermitslev, Engels and Glick2008; Virchow Reference Virchow1870).

Many adapted the connection between the Neanderthal skulls and the Borreby skulls, which provided Steensby scientific leverage to his claim of an original Danish population and, more importantly, provided an argument for using physical anthropological studies of contemporary populations to make claims of a deep evolutionary past in place of fossil evidence. In Steensby's scientific narrative, the Neanderthals were now furnished with character traits resembling those ascribed to the attractive Nordic type. Subsequently they were commended for their perseverance, will to survive, and presumed great intelligence owing to their large cranial capacity that was even bigger than average among contemporary humans. To Steensby, they were indeed ancestors one could be proud of: “Apart from being among the handsomest human elements in Europe, the Neanderthals are also one of the intellectually best equipped. There is both self-control and a predisposition to rule in that race” (Steensby Reference Steensby1911, 146; Gjerløff Reference Gjerløff2004, 83). While anthropologists were hesitant to follow Steensby all the way to a glorious ancestral Neanderthal past, the writer Johannes V. Jensen embraced the idea whole heartedly and was thus instrumental in bringing the idea to a wider audience. Steensby, on the other hand, was not criticized openly by his peers and in the aftermath a number of studies appeared connecting human remains with various interpretations of the Nordic Neanderthal hypothesis (see Gjerløff Reference Gjerløff2004).

As more and more of the European nations were announcing sensational findings in terms of fossil remains, artefacts and cave paintings, documenting their populations’ ancient human life and culture, the Scandinavians were left with far more recent material. Through contemporary physical anthropological studies and bold ideas like the Neanderthal hypothesis there seemed to be a way, however, to circumvent the need for ancient fossil and still make national claims to be among the first or the finest Europeans. In that respect, the many painstaking craniological studies of prehistoric skulls and contemporary populations in the Nordic countries and their possessions, that were added to the equally numerous craniological studies of other peoples around the world, had not been in vain (Retzius Reference Retzius1843; Virchow Reference Virchow1870; Barth Reference Barth1896; Jørgensen Reference Jørgensen1902; Retzius Reference Retzius1889; Retzius and Fürst Reference Retzius and Fürst1902; Fürst and Hansen Reference Fürst and Hansen1915; Bryn Reference Bryn1926; Bennike Reference Bennike and Spencer1997; Holck Reference Holck and Spencer1997a and Reference Holck and Spencer1997b). But still, a crucial find was missing.

Early ancestor or freak eskimo

The tiny settlement Gardar on the south coast of Greenland was not entirely unfamiliar to an English speaking reading public. Throughout the nineteenth century numerous articles were published in magazines and journals as different as Archaeologica Cambrensis, Athenaeum, Chambers Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts, Cornhill Magazine, Dublin Review, Edinburgh Review, Examiner, Household Words conducted by Charles Dickens, Leisure Hour, London Review of Politics, Society, Literature, Art and Science, National Observer, Orchestra, Quarterly Review, St James's Magazine, and many more. While these reports centered around two narratives of discovery and catholic history – the discovery of Iceland and North America by Vikings, and the story of the most northern diocese, bravely protected by ten consecutive bishops from 1124 to 1378 – they often touched upon the close ties between the population of the British Isles and a Scandinavian heritage. In the Christian monthly Good Words, edited by the Scottish minister Norman MacLeod and published in London, the special connection was quite explicit in an extraordinary narrative linking Viking explorers and Catholic settlers. Under the title Our Scandinavian Ancestors, the readers were instructed that despite all the other elements contributing to the British people, “the Scandinavians are our true progenitors.” This was true in both body and character, from the individual to the nation: “To the old Northmen – hailing from the sea-board of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark – may be traced the germs of all that is most characteristic of the modern Briton, whether personal, social, or national” (MacLeod Reference MacLeod and MacLeod1860, 273).

Gardar – from the old Norse word garðar, meaning stronghold, and Garðar Svavarsson, who was believed to have discovered Iceland in the ninth century – was thus perfect material for romantic tales of adventure, hardship, and Christianity. Svavarsson allegedly married a woman from the Hebrides and thus bolstered the British-Scandinavian link, while the bishops of Gardar, one after the other, fought heroically to build a cathedral and uphold the Christian settlement. Here the connection was again more formalized as Gardar was under the newly established Archdiocese of Nidaros in Trondheim, Norway, along with the dioceses of Iceland, Faroe Islands, Orkney, and Isle of Man (Berglund Reference Berglund1986; Beuermann Reference Beuermann and Imsen2010, 115). As the British had celebrated the cultural and biological relationship to their Scandinavian connections, one step too far was taken when Gardar again in the early 1930s had a quick rise to fame in the English speaking world.

In May 1930 Arthur Keith, one of the most influential and celebrated anthropologists in Britain at the time, gave a lecture to the Royal College of Surgeons in London about a discovery made by Frederik C. C. Hansen, professor of anatomy at the University of Copenhagen. Through Hansen, Keith had received drawings, photographs, and a full description of quite a remarkable skull from Gardar. During an archaeological expedition sent out by the National Museum of Copenhagen and headed by Poul Nørlund in 1926, the old burial place associated with the cathedral at Gardar was excavated (Nørlund Reference Nørlund1934 and 1936). About fifty graves were examined. Among the most notable finds were the remains of a bishop buried with the staff at his side and still wearing a gold ring on the bone of his finger. All skeletons were claimed to be descendents of Christian Vikings. Some of the men had strongly built bones and skulls, but there was one skull and one jaw bone that departed from the rest by being remarkably so and quite a lot bigger than the other skulls.

The skulls and skeletons were sent to Hansen at the University of Copenhagen, while Nørlund and his colleagues worked on the animal bones, rune inscriptions, and ruins at Gardar (Degerböl Reference Degerböl1929; Jónsson Reference Jónsson1929; Nørlund and Roussell Reference Nørlund and Roussell1929). Based on his studies, Hansen concluded that the skull and jaw bone belonged to the same individual and that they exhibited very ancient traits similar to those found in the remains from the recently discovered Rhodesian Man from southern Afrika and the Neanderthals from La Chapelle in France. If this proved to be correct, surprisingly, the find from an abandoned medieval Christian burial ground in Greenland could turn out to be a dark horse in the prestigious hunt for the earliest human. In order to be able to make a claim for the prize, Hansen had quickly concluded that the skull represented a new and undescribed type of human, and named him Homo gardarensis, the Man from Gardar.

The Times dutifully reported from Keith's lecture on the findings and Hansen's results, and asked the obvious question, “how did Homo gardarensis come to be buried in an early Christian Norse graveyard in Greenland?” (Anon. [Talib.] 1930). Keith had suggested that the explanation could be what he called an “okapi theory,” that the remains represented an ancient human form that had survived in Greenland and was passed down through the native population living in Greenland before the Norse settlers arrived.Footnote ⁸ Hansen had flatly refused to consider this. To him there was no doubt. The abnormal remains came from the Norse settlers. The challenge was to explain how it could be that Norse settlers had produced such a specimen that even in Keith's mind, at least at this point, beyond any doubt represented an unknown type of man. The curious thing was, of course, that the remains were not fossilized, but were found to be in the exact same condition as the other twelfth-century and normal human skeletal remains.

Hansen first made his preliminary findings public in the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende in 1929, and even though a full scientific analysis was planned for the series Meddelelser om Grønland [Communications on Greenland], it never appeared (Anon. [G—s] 1929a and 1929b). Despite being merely described in Danish and not even in a scientific journal or magazine, but presented to newspaper readers, Hansen's analysis quickly rose to fame through Keith's exposure. Besides the British newspapers, scientific journals also picked up the story. Keith expanded his first lecture on the topic in a lengthy supplement to Nature in June 1930, putting Homo gardarensis into the context of other recently discovered skulls from Java, Peking, and Rhodesia. Keith was reporting Hansen's findings faithfully, but was mildly critical of his interpretation. Although appreciating Hansen to be the world's foremost expert on skulls from Greenland based on his and Carl Magnus Fürst's Crania Groenlandica published in 1915, the potential sensation of the Gardar skull did not fit Keith's favorite evolutionary narrative that placed the last common ancestor safely in Britain. Besides, Keith also had another, secondary, pet theory to explain the abnormal appearance of the Gardar skull.

To Keith there were but four real contenders to the place as the number one human ancestor in 1930. From Asia were Pithecanthropus erectus, popularly known as Java Man, found by Dubois in the early 1890s, and Sinanthropus pekinensis, known as Peking Man, discovered by an international group of investigators, originally led by Uppsala University but eventually under the direction of the Canadian Davidson Black in the mid-1920s. In Europe were Homo heidelbergensis, Heidelberg Man, based on a fossilized jaw discovered by a workman in a sandpit in Maur, Germany, in 1907. The workman gave it to Otto Schoetensack, professor of anthropology at the University of Heidelberg, who classified and named it. Java Man, Peking Man, and Heidelberg Man were all promoted as human ancestors and each of them were claimed to be the Missing Link connecting modern humans with their ape-like progenitors.

To Keith, however, none of them qualified. Comparing the cranial capacity and brain size of Java Man and Peking Man with Neanderthals and the estimate for Heidelberg Man, the Asian fossils were regarded as evolutionary dead ends. There was simply not enough time, Keith argued, for them to have evolved such large brains from their modest cranial capacity to the impressive cranial capacity of modern humans. In other words, they could not be ancestral to modern humans. Heidelberg Man was classified by Keith to be of a pre-Neanderthal type, and as he also viewed Neanderthals as an evolutionary dead end, just like the one represented by Java Man and Peking Man, Heidelberg Man could also not make claims to be the ultimate ancestor. Consequently, there was only one true ancestor to modern humans in Keith's mind: Eoanthropus dawsonii, or Piltdown Man, found by Charles Dawson in a gravel pit in Southern England in 1908.Footnote ⁹ While Keith firmly believed in the authenticity of the Piltdown remains, a belief he shared with most anthropologists at the time, and as it fit both his own neat understanding of human evolution through brain development prior to bipedalism and was conveniently found in England, he was reluctant to give up his theory and favorite fossil for a rogue skull from Greenland. There had to be another explanation for Gardar Man's appearance.

While the international scientific community remained skeptical, Danes celebrated their surprise ancestor in the news with unaffected enthusiasm. Keith's commentary in Nature was reported with pride by Berlingske Tidende, glossing over the critical remarks, in an unabashed tribute to the discovery and the national scientific hero: “Denmark, having earned so many scientific laurels in Greenland, did not have to leave the scientific analysis of the findings to foreign specialists, as – and even without a university chair in anthropology – in Professor F. C. C. Hansen it has such an eminent researcher able to investigate a subject matter as Homo Gardarensis” (Anon. [Talib.] 1930).

When Berlingske Tidende first ran the story of Homo gardarensis, 6 June 1929, there were few details and neither photographs nor drawings to accompany the interview with Hansen. At that time Hansen did not find it appropriate to make any images public prior to the scientific publication. Soon after, however, he changed his mind. Rumors of the find had spread through the scientific community and following a request from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago for details and photographs, Hansen decided to make more information publicly available. Curiously, he did not go for an international announcement, but resolved to use a national channel of communication. Confident that Nørlund's findings and his own interpretation would cause a stir around the world, but at the same time anxious that a lot of reconstructions and speculation beyond his control would appear in international media, he finally allowed Berlingske Tidende's photographer to take pictures for the newspaper.

Hansen's confidence was boosted by how a series of highly publicized stories of supposedly human fossil finds during the 1920s had created headlines worldwide. Sometimes very little was needed to spin the imagination of scientists, journalists, and readers alike. A tiny skull from South Africa had been presented as Australopithecus africanus by Raymond Dart, while Davidson Black and his collaborators needed just a few fossil remains to announce Sinanthropus pekinensis. In fact, Davidson had originally named the genus based merely on a single tooth. Later finds corroborated this move, although at the time it was seen by many anthropologists as a bit premature. However, it was not the first time a new human ancestor had been announced on the basis of very little fossil evidence.

One of the most extraordinary claims came from Henry Fairfield Osborn who in April 1922 presented Hesperopithecus haroldcookii to the world. As president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Osborn was speaking with authority. Based on a single tooth found in the Snake Creek fossil beds of Nebraska, the New World could now pride itself of the first human, at least for a while. In Britain, one of the leading anthropologists of the day, Grafton Elliot Smith, stated in The Times that the small fragment “will probably prove to be the earliest and most primitive member of the human family that has yet been recovered” and he was enthusiastically backed up by an editorial (Elliot Smith Reference Elliot Smith1922a; Editorial 1922).

Accompanied by the rhetorical question: “A prehistoric Columbus who reached America by land?” The Illustrated London News was first to illustrate not only how Hesperopithecus looked, but also how he lived, in a fanciful recreation by the French artist Amédée Forestier. Again Elliot Smith was promoting Hesperopithecus as an early ancestor, based upon the authoritative claims of Osborn and William Gregory at the American Museum of Natural History (Elliot Smith Reference Elliot Smith1922b). Forestier himself explained that he had built his vision upon the assumption that Hesperopithecus had immigrated to the New World through Asia and thus would share similarities with Pithecanthropus, Java Man, “whose proportions and attitude were those of the average Englishman.” Slightly cautious, Elliot Smith was still excited about the illustration: “Mr. Forestier has made a remarkable sketch to convey some idea of the possibilities suggested by this discovery. As we know nothing of the creature's form, his reconstruction is merely the expression of an artist's brilliant imaginative genius” (Anon. 1922).

The tone had changed from celebration to caustic sarcasm in 1928 when it was discovered that despite all the hopes, the scientific name, the reconstructions, explanations, presentations and scientific articles, the tooth turned out to be far less interesting with regards to human evolution than initially thought. Under the headline “Hesperopithecus dethroned,” The Times dryly stated: “Only a wild pig.” William Gregory had re-examined the tooth while comparing it to a number of other teeth that unmistakably came from the same creature; and it was not very humanlike. Instead the tooth turned out to be from a Prosthennops, a Miocene pig and thus nothing close to a glamorous prehistoric Columbus. This message was important, The Times maintained, “because it means that the ‘missing link’ in the chain of evolution of the human being is still missing” (Anon. 1928; see also Editorial 1928).Footnote ¹⁰

The game was not over. There was indeed room for other candidates. But Hansen had seen how important it was to remain in control of events. He tried, but failed. Brushing aside any other ideas than Homo gardarensis being of noble Nordic stock and refusing explanations that included the indigenous population of Greenland, Hansen had found his Scandinavian ancestor to fit the construction of a national identity. The Danes definitely had something to be proud of. To the international readers of Science's newsletter, however, Gardar Man might just as well had been “a freak Eskimo” (Anon. 1930b).

Evolutionary vestiges

The construction of Homo gardarensis not only as a proto-human, but as a Scandinavian ancestor, required quite a bit of scientific and other kinds of imagination. As the presentation of the new human species was done in a national newspaper and Hansen's scientific description and analysis of the finding never appeared, his international peers had little to go on and were left with Keith's second-hand accounts. As it turned out, this would be enough to send Homo gardarensis to his grave for a second time. Meanwhile, Hansen persisted in the ancestral role of the individual for present day Scandinavians and, even more ambitiously, for the entire human species. The story about Nordic ancestry was made to fit into the special Viking heritage while his interpretation favored descent from trolls according to the old Norse myths to explain the abnormity of the skull over intermarriage between Norse settlers and the original inhabitants of Greenland. While he had already vented his ideas in Danish newspaper articles, they were expanded and explained in an article in The American-Scandinavian Review in 1931. This was the closest to a scientific article on the subject Hansen managed to produce. It was composed and neutral in tone, and yet allowed Hansen's speculations to run wild.

At the time of the discovery Hansen was in his early sixties. He was professor of anatomy at the University of Copenhagen and a member of the Government Committee for Scientific Research in Greenland. Apart from his craniological studies of skeletons and the contemporary population of Greenland, Hansen had made a name for himself in identifying and reconstructing the appearance of historical persons (Hansen Reference Hansen1921). His identification of the mummy of James Hepburn – 4th Earl of Bothwell and famous for being the third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots – buried in Faarevejle Church in Denmark had received quite a lot of national attention. Linking anthropological studies to writings and primary sources of historical events was part of Hansen's scientific mode of operation, a strategy that was both familiar and had previously proved to be quite successful when dealing with the not too remote past. It was thus with great confidence that Hansen described Homo gardarensis as “a curious primitive type” that he believed “must have been one of the individuals to whom the sagas ascribe jotun or troll extraction, men who were fierce and powerful but ugly in appearance” (Hansen Reference Hansen1931, 412).

Hansen tied his analysis to any historical sources he could find on the Viking discovery and settlement in Greenland and North America, quoting the sagas while analyzing the bones. He conscientiously described the archeological excavations at Gardar by Poul Nørlund in 1921 and 1926 that yielded at least 50 skeletons from around the twelfth century. What in Hansen's mind was a remarkable excavation with extraordinary finds turned into an argument for Nordic archaeology as equally interesting to, for instance, Egyptian archaeology. One of the finds at Gardar fit Hansen's previous research on historical persons, when they tentatively identified Jón Smyril, one of the bishops of Garder, buried in full Episcopal robes with his bishop's staff and a golden ring still on his finger, mentioned above.

It was not, however, an interest in the outposts of the Catholic Church that commanded Hansen's interpretation, but a narrative of Nordic identity and the harsh lives of the Norsemen. “We are justified,” Hansen assured his readers, “in picturing ourselves these men and women of the Northern race, who set out in small open boats to settle on the harsh coasts of Greenland and thence came to America, as being big, strong, hardy, and incredibly persisting people” (Hansen Reference Hansen1931, 415). This was reflected in the graves of Gardar, Hansen argued, that contained both mixed types of men and women, but also “pure Nordic types”: “Besides individuals of ordinary stature, we find some men of an extraordinary powerful type, just as we imagine that the old Vikings were” (ibid.). One of the hard questions about the Norse settlement in Greenland was why they were abandoned quite suddenly around 1500 (Lynnerup and Nørby Reference Lynnerup and Nørby2004). In Hansen's mind that was turning the question upside down. Instead he attributed the “original quality of the race” to why it took the Viking settlers so long to die out (Hansen Reference Hansen1931, 419). Any other settlers would have been long gone before the last Viking drew his breath in Greenland.

It was in this context that Hansen interpreted Homo gardarensis, as a member of a tough, pure Viking race, that had faced the challenges of open icy seas and stayed on despite harsh living conditions on barren rock and little to live on. Using a detailed illustration to explain the appearance of the abnormal skull, Hansen interwove the Viking narrative with his anthropological studies, arguing that the illustration documented “a large coarse Viking type with a powerful ‘bull neck’” (Hansen Reference Hansen1931, 417). Homo gardarensis was more than a mere Viking, however. In an extraordinary leap of imagination Hansen argued that the skull was evidence for evolutionary vestiges that had survived through countless generations to appear under special conditions in an isolated Viking settlement. With reference to the Icelandic saga of Eigil Skallgrimsson, Hansen furthermore saw authentic proof of the historical roots of Nordic tales of trolls abundant in local folklore. Homo gardarensis provided a package that included contemporary Scandinavian identity, Viking ancestry, Nordic folklore, archaeology, anthropology, and Darwinian as well as Lamarckian evolutionary ideas. All these things converged in Hansen's sweeping conclusion to answer The Times’ question explaining how such a primitive looking skull appeared in a Christian burial ground on the southern coast of Greenland:

Ancestral pockets of a deep evolutionary past had thus been kept and brought back to life through coincidental interbreeding. While Darwin's pigeon fanciers had bred new species artificially, in the case of Homo gardarensis, Nature had gone through a reverse process and thereby revealed an ancient and otherwise long extinct primitive kind. This primitive type was not primitive in any negative sense, however, but noble and strong, a survivor like the Vikings, who still shared the characters we could all thank our evolutionary existence for. To Hansen there was no doubt about the significance and interpretation of Homo gardarensis:

Hansen died just a few years later in 1934. Despite making sense of everything from trolls and the sagas to human evolution and Scandinavian identity, Homo gardarensis did not survive him. While Hansen tried to forget Keith's criticism, the opposite was not the case. Homo gardarensis was simply too good for Keith to leave out of his grand narrative of human evolution that appeared simultaneously in 1931.

Death of an ancestor

Sir Arthur Keith, at the top of his game, was generous and ruthless. He gave his Danish colleague great credit as the expert on skulls from Greenland, his fine description and the detailed illustrations of Homo gardarensis. But he did not any longer even tentatively accept Hansen's conclusions and the ambitious attempt to invent a new human species, and thus efficiently put an end to the dreams of claiming an evolutionary sensation and creating a unique Nordic ancestor.

Through Hansen's silence, Keith had become the international expert on Homo gardarensis and assumed the voice of authority that Hansen failed to take. Playing to a local audience, Hansen won the ears of his compatriots, but lost them to the world. Even though Hansen eventually published in English, making the thoughts he originally vented in newspaper interviews available to a larger international audience, it was too little, too late, and in an outlet too obscure to attract any particular attention. Homo gardarensis became famous because of Keith. Hansen's name was duly noted and his achievements in bringing about knowledge of the abnormal skull dutifully reported. But the story, the angle, and the conclusion remained Keith’s.

Keith's lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons in London in 1930 was already widely reported. His extensive eight-page supplement to Nature published later the same year gave Homo gardarensis the lead role in a presentation of the newest and most important fossil finds, which furthered interest in it (Keith Reference Keith1930). The Gardar Man was thus well-known and in 1931 ready to serve a new purpose as advertising front to promote the sales of Keith's synthesis of human evolution in New Discoveries Relating to the Antiquity of Man. Running seventeen pages, the last chapter was dedicated entirely to Homo garderensis. Keith made it quite clear that whereas Hansen thought the skull represented an unnamed type of humanity, one in which the features of early humans had suddenly reappeared, he himself thought the abnormal size to be pathological and the result of a combination of giantism and acromegaly, both causing abnormal skeletal growth. Keith explained that he had presented this hypothesis to Hansen, but that the latter had refused it to the advantage of his own theory of ancestral vestiges in the Norse population occupying Greenland. As a result of this communication, Hansen had furnished Keith with his notes, measurements, illustrations, and photographs, giving his British colleague the next best thing to the skull itself to form his own conclusions.

Unfortunately for Hansen, the facts corroborated Keith's initial hypothesis that the size of the skull was indeed the result of a pathological affliction and not a deep evolutionary trait that suddenly revealed itself. In the end Keith did not rule out that there could be an affinity between the Norse settlers and the occurrence of this anomaly, something they shared with a series of Irish incidents of a similar medical condition. But this only meant that the Irish and the Norse settlers shared a possibility of developing the symptoms through a common ancestor, not that they represented one. Thus, to Keith, Homo gardarensis was not interesting because of what Hansen claimed him to be, not because of what interpretation the facts were given. He concluded that “the chief interest of the discovery of Gardar lies in the fact that a human skull, manifestly of modern date, should reproduce so many resemblances to skulls of ancient palaeolithic man” (Keith Reference Keith1931, 499). Hansen, needless to say, was not pleased, which is evident from the extensive notes in the margins of his copy of New Discoveries (Gjerløff Reference Gjerløff2004, 86).

Keith had successfully appropriated Hansen's analysis, itself an appropriation of Nørlund's archaeological findings, which now dominated the narrative. Not everybody agreed with Keith, but that was for different reasons and Hansen was soon forgotten in the turbulent interwar discussions of human evolution. To Grafton Elliot Smith, Keith's British archrival, the only reason to remember Homo gardarensis was to criticize New Discoveries. He did so in an acidic review in Nature spanning an exceptional nine columns and consisting largely of telling readers why Keith had gotten it all wrong in the interpretation of the Piltdown remains and a skull found during the construction of a new building for Lloyds in London in the 1920s. The chapter on Homo gardarensis could serve no other purpose for Keith, Elliot Smith concluded, than to suggest that “he [Keith] is not serious” (Elliot Smith Reference Elliot Smith1931, 966). Franz Weidenreich in Germany remained more neutral, duly noted Homo gardarensis, but took no particular notice (Weidenreich Reference Weidenreich1930).

If only for a short while, Frederik C. C. Hansen managed to enter the scientific contest and make a claim for the earliest ancestor. Building on a Scandinavian trend to regard Neanderthals as both noble and ancestral, and a tradition of combining archaeological findings with exegesis of Norse text, in the manner of Poul Nørlund with regard to Greenland (Nørlund Reference Nørlund1928) and complying with the standards and privileged situation of Danish science as argued by Knud Rasmussen (Rasmussen Reference Rasmussen1929), Hansen constructed a Nordic ancestor, explaining the golden age of the Vikings and giving the contemporary Scandinavian populations something to be proud of: strong, powerful, and persevering forefathers, carrying what had brought humanity forward and handing it on to their descendents in present day Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and Denmark.

Ignoring the world around them, Danes cheered, if only for a short while, for their eminent scientist and their surprise ancestor. He made the front page of Berlingske Tidende in 1929, but when Hansen died five years later, so did Homo gardarensis (Anon. [G—s] 1929a and 1929b). Poul Nørlund, who was in charge of the original excavations at Gardar, presented an account of the Viking settlement in Greenland in 1934, the year of Hansen's death. Although Hansen was acknowledged as an expert in his field and a detailed description of his study of Jón Smyril's skeleton was included in the lengthy chapter on Gardar, there was no reference to Homo gardarensis. As the English translation appeared two years later, Nørlund felt no inclination to include the remarkable skull in the narrative. Neither did Ellis H. Minns, the Disney Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, who wrote the foreword to the translation. “Nothing in the history of the world is quite like the story of the Norse settlement in Greenland,” Minns declared and continued, “certainly nothing gives me quite the same thrill” (Nørlund Reference Nørlund1936, 5). Minns was happily thrilled about the fate of the Viking settlement without the surprise human ancestor in the far north. As a palaeoanthropological flash in the pan, Homo gardarensis was shelved by the few who had paid any serious scientific attention to the abnormal skeletal remains from Gardar. For the most part, however, it was ignored.

At the University of Copenhagen, Hansen's successor Knud Fischer-Møller, had little respect for his predecessor's analysis of the Gardar skull. Gone were any romantic relationships to a glorious evolutionary past. Keith's hypothesis of acromegaly was mentioned, but dismissed as some diagnostic characteristics were missing. The final chapter on Homo gardarensis was written by Fischer-Møller and two collaborators who devoted no less than thirteen pages, more than a fifth of the body of text on their anthropological investigation of the remains from Gardar, on Gardar VII, as the evolutionary sensation was now demoted to. Hansen's work was entirely rejected as his conclusions were considered to be based upon “almost without exception hypothetical measurements” (Bröste, Fischer-Møller, and Pedersen 1944, 27). Stripped of their orders, Hansen and the Gardar Man drifted into oblivion. Left was only a pathological case of an endocrine disease and a sad professor.

Homo gardarensis has entered history books as another example in a long list of fraudulent or exaggerated archaeological and palaeontological finds. But as in the case of other more famous dethroned human ancestors like the Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man, the history of Gardar Man reveals far more about scientific practice in the highly competitive and burgeoning field of palaeoanthropology in the forming years of the early twentieth century. Palaeoanthropology was only beginning to be recognized and established as a scientific field in its own right. An evolutionary explanation was genereally accepted as the best framework for understanding the deep history of humanity. But theoretically, practically, and institutionally there was little consensus and thus far wider margins in terms of academic imagination than would be the case as palaeoanthropology matured as a discipline in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The fierce personal fights between rivals at different institutions and in different countries inflated egos and regularly lent more to speculation than would normally be accepted in early twentieth-century scientific circles. The politics of prehistory was particular and patriotic. Palaeanthropological practice was biased, but it was also spirited and productive. Many mistakes and fanciful claims were made. Eoanthropus dawsonii, Hesperopithecus haraldcookii, and Homo gardarensis, however, played their crucial part in the formation of a scientific discipline and an increasingly critical scientific study of human origins. Their departure may have been less spectacular than their first sensational appearance, their deaths less glamorous. But they belong to the history of science as a reminder of how scientific practice is entrenched in scholarly conflicts, political agendas, cultural narratives, institutional concerns, and multiple actors with diverging interests across borders and disciplines. Science is all that, palaeoanthropology too.