Short answers, pulled from the story.
Local schoolteacher Johann Carl Fuhlrott found the remains inside the Kleine Feldhofer Grotte cave within Germany's Neander Valley. These remains included a cranium, thigh bones, and fragments of an arm and shoulder blade.
German anthropologist Hermann Schaaffhausen studied the specimen in 1857 and presented it to the scientific community. This presentation occurred after Fuhlrott found the bones during the year 1856.
The spelling Neanderthal comes from Joachim Neander, a late seventeenth-century theologian who visited the valley often. He was not the discoverer but provided his name for the location where the fossils were found.
Neanderthals diverged from common ancestors with modern humans during the early Middle Pleistocene epoch roughly 400,000 to 500,000 years ago. Genetic data suggests this split occurred within that timeframe before populations migrated out of Africa around 1.9 million years ago.
Average height reached about 164 centimeters for males and 159 centimeters for females in samples from fourteen men and seven women. Limbs were proportionally short compared to modern humans while their braincase averaged 1,500 cubic centimeters for males and 1,300 cubic centimeters for females.