But it was only with the development of ancient genetic analysis – so preposterously beyond 19th-century science it would have seemed magic – that we were able to confirm she was a woman. Despite the pulled-forward face and cavernous nasal aperture, her skull is small and brows slightly less jutting than the Feldhofer cranium. Photo courtesy the Natural History Museum, LondonĪs the 19th century gave way to the 20th and more Neanderthal bones began to be discovered, scientists began to suspect that the Forbes skull was female. The adult female Neanderthal cranium discovered at Forbes’ Quarry, Gibraltar.

Instead, the world-wrenching significance of the Forbes and Feldhofer fossils was the first proof of another kind of ancient human entirely. While her overall anatomy excited huge interest, her potential sex was little considered. Catching the eye of a visiting doctor with anthropological interests, she was packed aboard a ship bound for Britain, then introduced to none other than Darwin (who reportedly found the experience ‘wonderful’). However, the Forbes skull, as the earlier Gibraltarian find is now known, had to wait until 1863 for her turn in the limelight. The first recognised Neanderthal was a different skull-top, blasted from the Feldhofer cave in Germany in 1856, just two years before Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin presented their theory of evolution by natural selection.

While monarchies fell and serfs breathed the sweet air of freedom that year, it would take another decade for human origins as a science to begin its own overthrow of the old world order. Calcite mantling her skull meant that, at first, she seemed more a hunk of stone than a once warm-blooded being, and obscured her decidedly odd anatomy – massive eyes, heavy brow ridges and a low, long cranium. As the social and liberal revolutions of 1848 began convulsing Europe, quarry workers’ rough hands pulled her from the great Rock of Gibraltar. The first Neanderthal face to emerge from time’s sarcophagus was a woman’s.

Neanderthal kindred