According to Wikipedia the name of the man the Neander valley was named after is derived from the German name Neuman(n). This seems a bit too coincidental. Is this true?
Well neo is greek for new and andro is greek for man so if someone wanted to calque Neumann into greek, Neander seems about right.
The valley was named for poet and hymn writer Joachim Neander, who found inspiration there in the 17th century. An ancestor had Hellenized the name from Neumann. Both names, of course, mean “new man”. Everything I’ve read suggests the valley was called Neanderthal (-tal in modern spelling) before the human fossils were discovered there in 1856.
So yes, it was a coincidence that a new species or subspecies of man was discovered there. In a world with a lot of facts, you have to occasionally expect the unexpected coincidence between some of them. If there are, say, one million facts about the known universe, then there are almost half a trillion unique pairs of facts. Most such pairs are completely unremarkable: (1) the sky is blue and (2) Mozart died at the age of 35. Or (1) Germany is a country in Europe and (2) It takes light eight minutes to reach the earth from the sun. Big deal. But half a trillion pairs is an inconceivably huge number. Even a one-in-a-million type coincidence should occur between the two facts in a pair about 500,000 times (half a trillion divided by a million). That includes coincidences like (1) a new kind of man was discovered in a place called Neandertal and (2) Neandertal means “new man valley”.
So…Andro, Andrew, Andrea’, Andy=Man.
Good to know.
But they didn’t find a new man, they found an old one.
And originally, people believed it was not a human fossil at all, or that it was a modern man with a bone disease.
Reading “new man” into the discovery is modern retrofitting of history onto the contemporary facts.
I think Exapno is right. It was a new discovery, but all discoveries are new, so that alone would not tend to motivate deliberate inclusion of “new” into a name. If deliberate, it would generally indicate some aspect by comparison to something similar but older. So it weakens how remarkable the coincidence really is, it’s just the “ander” part.
From Wikipedia:
Had the remains been found earlier, would we now speak of Gersteintal (Boulder) Man, or DogMan or BeastMan?
[/me ducks for cover] [or covers for ducks]
Or Cliff?
Given the name Neander, perhaps it should be ManMan. Or was that a man who was bitten by a radioactive man and gained the special powers of a man?
Sexual harassment?
[1] That would be NewManMan. Beware if it goes recursive.
[2] That would be NukeMan. Obviously linked to RepoMan.
You win!
Well, that depends on what we mean by “man.” “Andro” means an adult male person, but the sense of “mankind” swaps the delta for a theta, putting the “anthro” in “anthropology.”
I don’t think the Neanderthal coincidence is as on-the-nose as it may seem.
Even though “andro” is male-specific, it is still used for unisex at times, as in the case of “android.”
But that was not coined in Greek; the person who coined it may simply have not understood the difference.
How about ‘androgenous’?
Okay, but andrias < ανδριάντας is “statue” in the Greek, regardless of gender.
Same point as before.
Assuming this is a word you’ve derived meaning “of or related to androgens”, then yes, that definitely comes from ἀνδρο- (andro-, meaning “male human”) and not ἀνθρωπο- (anthropo-, meaning “human”). But I think that concept is more usually lexicalized as “androgenic”.
I assume you’re joking psychonaut, but I took it as a typo for androgynous. In which context the andro- part does obviously mean specifically male.