William King (geologist)

William King (22 April 1809 – 24 June 1886), was an Anglo-Irish geologist at Queen's College Galway. He was the first (in 1864) to propose that the bones found in the German valley of Neanderthal in 1856 were not of Homo sapiens, but of a distinct species: Homo neanderthalensis. He proposed the name of this new species at a meeting of the British Association in 1863, with the written version published in 1864.^[1]