Qualla: Mettmann

Mettmann: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BücherschrankImWesten, CC BY-SA 4.0. In August 1856, workers at a small limestone quarry in a wooded valley outside Mettmann uncovered some bones in a cave called Feldhofer Grotte. The bones did not look quite right. The skullcap was thick and ridged, the limb bones were heavier than they should have been. The quarry foreman set them aside, thinking they might be a cave bear, and showed them to a local schoolteacher named Johann Carl Fuhlrott. Fuhlrott knew bones. He took one look and understood, before anyone else in the world, that he was holding the remains of a creature that was almost, but not quite, human. The valley was called the Neander Valley. The new species, named for it, became Homo neanderthalensis. The quarry is gone, the cave was destroyed in the limestone extraction that produced the discovery in the first place, but the species named for a sleepy Westphalian valley now anchors our understanding of who we are.

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Image: BücherschrankImWesten | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mettmann: Why It Was Called the Neander Valley

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matthias Kaiser, CC BY-SA 4.0. The valley itself was named for a man who never set foot in it expecting to be remembered by geologists. Joachim Neander, born in nearby Bremen in 1650 and a Lutheran pastor and hymn-writer who served in Dusseldorf in the late 1670s, spent his free afternoons walking the limeston...

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Image: Matthias Kaiser | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mettmann: From Bones to Museum

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oliver Jennrich, CC BY-SA 3.0. The original 1856 specimen, known as Neanderthal 1, included a skullcap, two femurs, three right arm bones, two left arm bones, parts of a pelvis, and fragments of ribs. The Bonn anatomist Hermann Schaaffhausen and Fuhlrott published the first scientific description in 1857, two ...

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Image: Oliver Jennrich | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mettmann: Medamana on the Road to Cologne

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Mettmann itself is older than its famous valley would suggest. The town first appears in writing in 904 AD, in the charter of King Louis the Child, the last Carolingian ruler of East Francia. The name was then Medamana, meaning roughly 'between the streams,' and the location was ...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Mettmann: Samba in Mettmann

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lwulfe, CC BY-SA 4.0. Mettmann is no ordinary commuter suburb of Dusseldorf, though it could easily be one. The town has long hosted Brazilian cultural events, with samba dancers flown in for festivals and a sizable Brazilian community taking root over the decades. This odd Rhineland-Brazilian fusion ...

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Image: Lwulfe | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mettmann: The Town That Survived Itself

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pitichinaccio, Public domain. Mettmann emerged from World War II almost untouched by bombing. The US Ninth Army liberated the town on 16 April 1945, and the British military administration moved in to oversee the redemocratization of the northern Rhineland. While Cologne and Dusseldorf were piles of brick dus...

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Image: Pitichinaccio | Public domain