Fossil Human of Belgium: a review of Quaternary Collections of ULiege

Palaeoanthropology emerged as a science in the 19th century Belgium. Philippe-Charles Schmerling is notably considered as the first palaeoanthropologist by his pairs. He was the first to survey bone deposits in caves around Liège where he discovered in 1830 what he interpreted as the remains of a fossil man different from Homo sapiens. Unfortunately, his fellow scientists were not ready to accept this revolutionary idea and Schmerling’s discoveries were forgotten for over a century. In the 1880s, Prof. Julien Fraipont re-discovered Schmerling’s collection of Quaternary megafauna and subsequently followed the same path when he started to study the cave remains with his colleague Maximin Lohest. Together they described another Belgian celebrity: the ‘Spy Man’ – in fact two incomplete skeleton, identified as a Neanderthalian in 1887. For the first time a fossil man was uncovered from the same horizon than extinct megafauna and Mousterian artefacts. Charles Fraipont, Julien’s son and successor at the Chair of Palaeontology studied Schmerling’s fossils and identified officially the ‘Engis Child’ as the first ever described Neanderthalian. Charles Fraipont created the School of Palaeoanthropology in the 1910s and developed his discipline worldwide. He gathered copies of all fossil human remains known at the time, together with a large amount of anthropological objects. Nowadays, all archaeological and anthropological objects have been split between several institutions but the bulk of the Quaternary megafaunal collection, gathered by these four scientists, is housed in Liège, most of it remains unstudied under modern aspects.