A Mysterious Child With Human And Neanderthal Traits Found In Portugal Was Buried 28,000 Years Ago
New research has found that the skeleton of a child with both Neanderthal and modern human traits has been dated to around 28,000 years ago. The date changes what archaeologists initially believed about burial rituals in what is now Portugal.
The child’s skeleton was discovered in 1998 in the Lagar Velho rock shelter located in the Lapedo Valley of central Portugal. It was named the “Lapedo child.”
Upon excavation, the researchers noticed the skeleton’s distinct Neanderthal and human features right away, suggesting it was a hybrid individual.
The child had short, stocky legs like a Neanderthal but a prominent chin like a human’s. The discovery of a hybrid child at the Lapedo site was not widely accepted in the late 1990s. The Lapedo child was uncovered a decade before the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced.
From there, we now know more about interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals. Ancient DNA has shown that they have interbred several times over thousands of years.
The study of the Lapedo child was no easy feat. Researchers had a hard time dating the skeleton. In the past, four attempts using traditional radiocarbon dating methods had been made, but poor preservation could produce only a broad timeframe of 20,000 to 26,000 years ago, which was much more recent than expected.
But a new chemical method known as compound-specific radiocarbon analysis (CSRA) has helped determine that the Lapedo child lived earlier than previously thought.
The CSRA method has been around for a while, although it was only recently used to redate Neanderthal sites contaminated by modern carbon.
“The key benefit of compound-specific radiocarbon dating is that it is extremely effective at removing contamination from archaeological bones,” said Bethan Linscott, the first author of the study and a geochemist at the University of Miami.
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“This is especially important when dealing with poorly preserved bones because even trace amounts of contamination present in such samples can seriously impact the accuracy of the date.”
The research team also reexamined three elements that were assumed to be part of the Lapedo child’s burial ritual. There were rabbit bones found on top of the child, red deer bones next to the child’s shoulder, and charcoal underneath the child’s legs from a ritual fire.
However, the researchers realized that only the rabbit bones were from the same timeframe as the Lapedo child, while the red deer bones and charcoal were significantly older. This indicated that they were already present at the site at the time of the child’s burial.
The rabbit was likely placed on top of the body of the Lapedo child as an offering 28,000 years ago. Then, the site was abandoned for at least two millennia.
“The death of the child may have triggered a declaration of the place as taboo or as unsuitable for mundane hunting activities, leading to people avoiding it until such time as the event faded from social memory,” said João Zilhão, an archaeologist at the University of Barcelona.
The study was published in the journal Science Advances.
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