We set off to Krapina Neanderthal Museum in Krapina – only 25 minutes drive away.

When we arrived we were met with a large Neanderthal statue. Glenn looked very small beside it.

The entrance to the museum was very impressive – looking a bit like a big cave.

When we went in a movie was showing on the huge screen. It showed a recreation of a group of Neanderthal people going about their daily life.

Interesting facts were that they behaved pretty much as normal humans living in a cave would behave. The men went out hunting. The women looked after the fire in the cave and sick members of the community. They foraged for plants to use as food and medicines. They also used their teeth to hold onto animal hides when scraping them clean.

The filming had been done by meticulously adding facial and body changes to the actors including heavier brows and hairy bodies. All the actors were stocky and strong.

It was a good start to understanding what a Neanderthal looked like and how they behaved.

The museum then went on to explain about how the discoveries of Neanderthal bones and associated evidence was found here in 1899.

There has been a long history of pharmacy in Krapina. The bones were discovered and first recognised as strange by a pharmacist in the early 1800s. Then in the late 1800s a schoolteacher who was interested in geology found these bones and packaged and sent them off to professor Dragutin Gorjanović-Kramberger, a well-known Croatian geologist.

This led to professor Gorjanović-Kramberger performing an archeological dig on the site – a sand bank with different levels of remains over time beside a rock overhang.

It was due to his, at the time, very advanced and diligent scientific methods that the results were found. He got a lot of information out of only bits of bones that had to be reconstructed into skulls and teeth. The stone tools being located in the same sand layer as the bones had alerted him to the fact that these were intelligent beings.

The method of scraping animal hides and holding on with their teeth was discerned from the scratch marks on the teeth.

The museum then goes into the whole evolution of life from the Big Bang through to the start of life on earth, through dinosaurs up to today’s humans.

One of the first life forms were large cockroach like forms. We still have very similar life forms in Australia today!

One of the major discoveries were the footprints from Lake Mungo in Australia from 20,000 years ago. This was the first evidence in the world of humans walking. Burials Mungo Lady and Mungo Man found there are from 40,000 years ago.

Here is Glenn the homo sapien with his ancestors.

There are currently 2 theories as to how Homo sapiens evolved and our relationship to Neanderthals.

The first ‘out of Africa’ model is that Homo sapiens emerged in Africa and all came from there while Neanderthals died out.

The second ‘regional’ model says that humans evolved over a long chronological period of time in different areas with overlapping swapping of genetic material between the areas. This means we all have Neanderthal as a percentage of our makeup. However this could also be explained by Neanderthals mating with Homo sapiens – so it’s not clear as yet.

There was a huge amount of interesting information in the museum – a lot of reading.

We then went on the walk outside to see the locations of the discoveries.

Here is the rock shelter where the main finds were located in a sand bank – no longer there now of course as it was taken apart by the archeologists.

It was very quiet with very few tourists – so the cafe was closed.

There was an old castle up the hill. We had to walk across the train line to get back to the van. The rails line are not fenced off.

We then drove half an hour to Krapina Toplice – a village centered around a spa. The Aquae Vitae spa has been going since the mid 1800s. A large rehabilitation hospital is located here too based on the healing spa waters.

We parked in the spa carpark where we were allowed to stay overnight – with free electricity.

We went in – the day pass is only 18 euro – and first had lunch at the in-spa restaurant. The food is traditional but supposedly healthy. Beans with local sausage for Glenn and turkey schnitzel with sautéed potatoes and spinach for me – all very good – but healthy?

We then enjoyed a relaxing soak in the 35 degree water with blasting jets here and there. We swam some lengths in the lap pool and got thrown around in the wave pool. We then had a relaxing time on the loungers.

Around 7pm it was starting to cool off so we headed back to the van. We then went to check out the town and had a drink at a bar the way.

We then went back to the van and watched another movie – The Amateur – an entertaining action movie before bed – and slept well after all that relaxation.