Greetings, respectable community, nice to meet you all, and thanks a lot for the attention to this post, where I'd like to introduce myself and, in order to use it purposefully, ask a couple of questions that perplex me.
My name is Igor, I'm mechanical design engineer from Russia, and I ardent fan of the German scientific and, particularly, philosophic literature (at least of those specimens, translated in Russian and English), and self-evidentely I'm extremely fond of German language.
Now I'm reading two books: the first, "vom Faustkeil zum Röntgenstahl" (Istvan Benedek) is a history of science book, and the second one, "Deutsch für Techniker" is sort of adopted technical brochure for foreign students. Second book is much easier, it's intended to be used by beginners, on the contrary, the first one include some complicated and sometimes intimidating statements.
As far as I figured out, hunting high and low through this marvelous forum for some time, there is no one certain dedicated place for posting the translation-related questions, so what I really was wondering is should I create the new one (called, say, "all translation-related questions to be posted here"), or use one of the previously created by other participants?
The second issue I'd like to beg your help with is the translation of the sentence in the above mentioned book. So, it concerns to the first discovery of the prehistoric human leftovers in the cave in Spain (the italics sentence is that I cannot translate, and the rest is given here for the sake of a context):
[...] In der zweiten Hälfte des vergangenen Jahrhunderts hatten fortschrittlich gesinnte Fossilienforscher sich bereits der Darwinschen Lehre angenommen. Sie waren deshalb nicht erstaunt, auf urmenschliche Spuren zu stoßen. Es stimmt zwar, dass das erste Skelett eines Neandertalers, das im Jahre 1856 von Karl Fuhlrott bei Düsseldorf entdeckt wurde, nicht als autentischer Urmensch anerkannt worden war, sondern erst ein halbes Jahrhundert später. [...]
I'd be very grateful for help on translation of this sentence.
And, once again, very nice to meet you all.