This paper explores how three central figures in the field of British prehistory – Sir Arthur Keith, Sir Grafton Elliot Smith and Louis Leakey – deployed different disciplinary practices and narrative devices in the popular accounts of human bio-cultural evolution that they produced during the early decades of the twentieth century. It shows how they used a variety of strategies, ranging from virtual witness through personal testimony to tactile demonstration, to ground their authority to interpret the increasingly wide range of fossil material available and to answer the bewildering variety of questions that could be asked about them. It investigates the way in which they positioned their own professional expertise in relation to fossil interpretation, particularly with regard to the – sometimes controversial – use they made of concepts, evidence and practices drawn from other disciplines. In doing so, they made claims that went beyond their original disciplinary boundaries. The paper argues that while none of these writers were able, ultimately, to support the wider claims they made regarding human prehistory, the nature of these claims deserves much closer attention, particularly with respect to the public role that historians of science can and should play in relation to present-day calls for greater interdisciplinarity.

The Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Spain is ranked among the most important excavation sites in human origins research worldwide. The project boasts not only spectacular hominid fossils, among them the ‘oldest European’, but also a fully fledged ‘popularization industry’. This article interprets this multimedia industry as a generator of different narratives about the researchers as well as about the prehistoric hominids of Atapuerca. It focuses on the popular works of the three co-directors of the project. Juan Luis Arsuaga, José María Bermúdez de Castro and Eudald Carbonell make deliberate use of a variety of narrative devices, resonant cultural references and strategies of scientific self-commodification. All three, in different ways, use the history of science and of their own research project to mark their place in the field of human origins research, drawing on mythical elements to tell the story of the rise of a humble Spanish team overcoming all odds to achieve universal acclaim. Furthermore, the co-directors make skilful use of palaeofiction – that of Björn Kurtén and Jean Auel, as well as writing their own – in order to tell gripping stories about compassion and solidarity in human prehistory. This mixture of nationalist and universalist narratives invites the Spanish audience to identify not just with ‘their ancestors’ but also with the scientists, as objects and subjects of research become conflated through popularization.

A fossilized skeleton discovered in 1856 presented naturalists with a unique challenge. The strange, human-looking bones of the first recognized Neanderthal confronted naturalists with a new type of object for which they had no readily available interpretive framework. This paper explores the techniques and approaches used to understand these bones in the years immediately following the discovery, in particular 1856–1864. Historians have previously suggested that interpretations and debates about Neanderthals hinged primarily on social, political and cultural ideologies. In this paper, I will argue that much of the scientific controversy surrounding the first recognized Neanderthal centred on questions of methodology and practice, and will demonstrate this through an exploration of the tools and approaches naturalists utilized in their examinations of the fossils. This will contribute to a growing historical recognition of the complex exchange between disciplines including geology, archaeology and comparative anatomy in the early study of fossil hominins, and provide a future framework for histories of Neanderthal debates in the twentieth century.