The Hybrid Child from Portugal
by Erik Trinkaus and Cidalia Duarte
From Who were the Neanderthals? Scientific American April 2000
On a chilly afternoon in late November 1998, while inspecting the Abrigo do Lagar Velho rock-shelter in central Portugal's Lapedo Valley, two archaeology scouts spotted loose sediment in a rodent hole along the shelter's back wall. Knowing that burrowing animals often bring deeper materials to the surface, one of the scouts reached in to see what might have been unearthed. When he withdrew his hand, he held in it something extraordinary: bones of a human child buried nearly 25,000 years ago.
Subsequent excavation of the burial, led by one of us (Duarte), revealed that the four-year-old had been ceremonially interred-covered with red ocher and laid on a bed of burnt vegetation, along with pierced deer teeth and a marine shell-in the Gravettian style known from modern humans of that time across Europe.Based on the abrupt cultural transition seen in archaeological remains from the Iberian Peninsula,it seemed likely that when moderns moved into the area after 30,000 years ago,they rapidly replaced the native Neandertals.So it stood to reason that this specimen, called Lagar Velho 1, represented an early modern child. In fact, it didn't occur to us at first that it could be anything else.
This wonderfully complete skeleton does have a suite of features that align it predominantly with early modern Europeans.These include a prominent chin and certain other details of the mandible (lower jaw), small I front teeth, characteristic proportions and muscle markings on the thumb, the narrowness of the front of the pelvis, and several aspects of the shoulder blade and forearm bones.Yet intriguingly, a number of features also suggest Neandertal affinities-specifically the front of the mandible (which slopes backward despite the chin), details of the incisor teeth, the pectoral muscle markings, the knee proportions and the short, strong lower-leg bones.Thus,the Lagar Velho child appears to exhibit a complex mosaic of Neandertal and early modern human features.
This anatomical amalgam is not the result of any abnormalities.Taking normal human growth patterns into consideration, our analysis indicates that except for a bruised forearm, a couple of lines on the bones indicating times when growth was trivially arrested (by sickness or lack of food) and the fact that it died as a child, Lagar Velho I developed normally.The combination can only have resulted from a mixed ancestry-something that had not been previously documented for western Europe.We therefore conclude that Lagar Velho 1 resulted from interbreeding between indigenous Iberian Neandertals and early modern humans dispersing throughout Iberia sometime after 30,000 years ago. Because the child lived several millennia after Neandertals are thought to have disappeared, its anatomy probably reflects a true mixing of these populations during the period when they coexisted and not a rare chance mating between a Neandertal and an early modern human.
Fieldwork conducted last summer yielded major portions of the skull and most of the remaining teeth, along with more archaeological material. And in an effort to fully understand this remarkable specimen,we have organized a team of specialists to examine the skeleton further. Among the projects planned are CT scan analyses of the skull and limb bones and computerbased virtual reconstruction of the damaged skull. Rigorous study is necessary because the discovery of an individual with such a mosaic of features has profound implications. First, it rejects the extreme Out of Africa model of modern human emergence, which proposes that early moderns originating in Africa subsequently displaced all archaic humans in other regions. Instead the Lagar Velho child's anatomy supports a scenario that combines a dispersal of anatomically modern humans out of Africa with mixing between that population and the archaic populations it encountered. (The African ancestry of early modern Europeans is reflected in their relatively long lower-leg bones, a tropical adaptation. Lagar Velho 1, however, has the short shins of the cold-adapted Neandertals.)
Lagar Velho 1 also provides insights into the behavioral similarities of Neandertals and early modern humans. Despite the paleontological evidence indicating anatomical differences between these two groups, their overall adaptive patterns, social behaviors and means of communication (including language) cannot have contrasted greatly. To their contemporaries, the Neandertals were just another group of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, fully as human as themselves.
ERIK TRINKAUS is a paleoanthropologist at Washington University.