In 1848 a quarryman's blast on the north face of the Rock loosened a near-complete human skull from the limestone. It was carried into town, shown to a small scientific society, and then labelled with a phrase that now reads like a joke at history's expense: "an ancient human, died before the universal flood." Filed away, it was shut inside a cupboard at the Garrison Library and forgotten. Inside that cupboard sat the first adult Neanderthal skull ever found. Gibraltar had it in hand eight years before the German valley that would lend the species its name had given up a single bone. For more than a decade, nobody knew what they were looking at. Forbes Quarry lies on the northern flank of the Rock of Gibraltar, near what is now Devils Tower Road. In the 1840s it was an active limestone quarry, and the blasting that fed Gibraltar's building works regularly turned up ancient bone cemented into the stone. The caves and fissures of the Rock are rich with this kind of material, the slow accumulation of tens of thousands of years sealed in rock. Among the finds was a remarkably complete adult skull, its face unusually well preserved. It was presented to the Gibraltar Scientific Society on 3 March 1848 by the society's secretary, Lieutenant Edmund Henry Réné Flint of the Royal Artillery. The record of that meeting is the only firm trace of the skull for years afterwards. There was no fanfare, no sense that a window onto a vanished human kind had just swung open. To be fair to the men of 1848, they had no framework for understanding what lay on the table in front of them. The very idea of an extinct, earlier form of humanity was not yet part of accepted science. Charles Darwin would not publish On the Origin of Species until 1859. The word Neanderthal did not exist. There was no comparative collection of ancient human bones to measure the skull against, because there were, in effect, no others. So it was catalogued as a curiosity, an old skull of uncertain age, interesting but not revolutionary. The note that accompanied it, "an ancient human, died before the universal flood," placed it firmly inside a biblical timescale rather than a prehistoric one. Then it went into the cupboard at the Garrison Library and stayed there, out of sight, while science slowly assembled the questions it could answer. In August 1856, workmen clearing the Kleine Feldhofer Grotte cave in the Neander Valley, east of Dusseldorf, uncovered a skullcap and limb bones. A local schoolteacher, Johann Carl Fuhlrott, recognised that these bones were not those of an ordinary modern human and passed them to the anatomist Hermann Schaaffhausen to study. Those German remains, now known as Neanderthal 1, became the type specimen, the reference point for the whole species. The Irish geologist William King proposed the name Homo neanderthalensis in a paper read to the British Association in 1863 and published in 1864, basing it squarely on the German find. The valley gave its name to a people who had ranged across Europe and beyond, including, as it happens, the very Rock where the 1848 skull still lay unstudied in a cupboard. The turning point came after Origin of Species lit a fresh interest in fossil humans. The Gibraltar skull travelled into the orbit of British scientists, and the palaeontologists George Busk and Hugh Falconer took it seriously at last. Busk recognised its kinship with the German Neander Valley fossil, and the specimen was sent to London in 1864, where it was shown at a meeting of the British Association. Falconer, struck by its importance, even proposed a name of his own for it, Homo calpicus, after Mons Calpe, the ancient name for the Rock of Gibraltar. That name never stuck. The German find had priority, and Neanderthal was already taking root. Had timing and recognition fallen differently, we might today speak of Calpican rather than Neanderthal people, and a Gibraltar quarry rather than a German valley would be lodged in every textbook. The science fell the other way, but the fossil itself lost none of its weight. > Gibraltar held the first adult Neanderthal skull in a cupboard, mislabelled and unread, for the years in which the world decided who these people were and what to call them. The specimen is now known as Gibraltar 1, and it is understood to be the skull of an adult Neanderthal woman. It is celebrated as the first adult Neanderthal skull ever found, and as one of the earliest Neanderthal fossils to be recognised once the German remains had been understood. Its completeness, especially that preserved face, makes it one of the most important Neanderthal specimens anywhere in the world. Today Gibraltar 1 resides in the Natural History Museum in London, where modern techniques keep prising new information out of it. In 2019 researchers working with the museum and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology managed to extract ancient DNA from bone powder taken from the base of the skull, confirming that the Forb