24,500 years ago, the body of a four-year-old boy was buried in an ocher-painted savannah and placed in a burial pit in the Lapedo Valley in central Portugal. But this boy was different from any modern human: His skeleton, which combined features of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, challenged conventional thinking about the origins of humanity.
This skeleton, known as the Lapedo Boy, was discovered in 1998. Until then, anthropologists believed that modern humans arose in East Africa and gradually replaced archaic species, including Neanderthals, in Eurasia. This concept assumed that our ancestors and Neanderthals were separate species that did not interbreed and that human expansion drove Neanderthals to extinction.
The discovery of the Lapedo Child disproved this scenario. It proved that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals and that the genes of these extinct hominids were preserved in their descendants. The boy had the characteristic jaw and inner ear of Homo sapiens, but the stocky body build and limbs of a Neanderthal.
Examination of this skeleton proved that the boy lived several thousand years after the extinction of Neanderthals. This revealed that some of their traits were deeply embedded in the human genome and that the child was part of a mixed population. In other words, interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans was quite common.
This suggests that Neanderthals did not disappear after the emergence of Homo sapiens, but actively merged with their neighbors, partially merging with them.
At the time of its discovery, the theory seemed radical and shocking, leading some scientists to dispute the initial findings. However, after the Neanderthal genome was sequenced in 2010, the theory of genetic admixture was confirmed. The researchers found that all modern non-African populations retain 1-4% of Neanderthal DNA; This proves that our ancestors interbred with these ancient hominids.
Over the years our phenotypes have equalized and we no longer have the typical Neanderthal build. But like Lapedo’s Child, those of us from outside Africa remain modern hybrids of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. Source
Source: Port Altele
