After four failed attempts, scientists have at last dated the skeleton of a possible human-Neanderthal hybrid found in Portugal more than two decades ago.
The famous and mysterious Lapedo child lived and died less than 30,000 years ago, a finding that sheds light on their burial, as well as human- Neanderthal relations.
Years before scientists sequenced the full Neanderthal genome, this skeleton was the one big clue we had that our ancestors were mating and mixing with their closest human relatives.
The discovery of the Lapedo child in 1998 turned the story of humankind inside out, hinting at a long and secret love affair.
Scientists found the skeleton of undetermined sex in an ancient rock shelter in Portugal, and it quickly became famous for its ‘mosaic’ of Neanderthal and human features – kicking off a fierce “academic furor” over whether it was a hybrid or not.
Now, many years after the Lapedo child’s discovery, some of the same researchers who first excavated the child have confirmed that this strange-looking human lived tens of thousands of years after Neanderthals went extinct.
If the Lapedo skeleton really is a hybrid, as some scientists maintain, it shows just how strong the influx of Neanderthal genes into the human lineage might have been. For more than ten thousand years, outward Neanderthal features persisted in the human lineage.
While the remains of the Lapedo child have yielded no direct DNA to confirm a shared Neanderthal-human ancestry, the appearance and age of the skeleton leaves open the possibility.
“Being able to successfully date the child felt like giving them back a tiny piece of their story, which is a huge privilege,” lead author Bethan Linscott from the University of Oxford told the Associated Press in an email.
Nowadays, it is no longer a radical notion that Neanderthals and human ancestors interbred. In fact, we know that Neanderthals and humans were getting it on a lot right across Eurasia. Some people have even found out the approximate percentage of their genes they can attribute to Neanderthals thanks to genetic testing, which can sometimes reach up to 4 percent of the areas of variability between our species.
Since 1998, there have been four previous attempts to date the Lapedo child’s bones, all of which were unsuccessful due to the degradation and carbon contamination of the remains.
Finally, modern advances have made the feat possible, and the dates scientists have come up with change some of the ways we view the child’s burial.
Using a sample of the skeleton’s right radius, an international team of researchers measured the radiocarbon decay rate in a major component of collagen, a technique used for particularly degraded remains. This allowed them to determine the bones were between 27,780 and 28,550 years old.
Neanderthals went extinct roughly 40,000 years ago.
Some of the animal bones buried near the child, like the pelvis of a red deer, were significantly older than the human, which suggests they were not killed as part of the burial ritual, as some researchers once proposed, but possibly used to create a burial ‘structure’.
Even the charcoal found at the burial site is at least 150 years older than the child, according to the new dating study. This refutes the idea that there was ritual burning upon burial.
The skeleton of the Lapedo child is stained red by ochre, and this may have occurred from a dyed ‘shroud’ the remains were buried in. The bones of rabbits littered around the child, including across its legs, are also stained red, which suggests they were intentionally placed there as part of the burial. The dates of the rabbit bones broadly align with this interpretation.
Lapedo may have been the first early human hybrid proposed by scientists, but the individual wasn’t the last.
In 2012, scientists working in Russia excavated the skeleton of a roughly 13-year-old hominin, who, according to her DNA, is the result of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. ‘Denny‘ is the only known first-generation hybrid hominin.
In 2015, genetic research on a fossil in Romania found an ancient individual, who looks similar to the Lapedo child and who contains up to 11 percent autosomal Neanderthal DNA, hinting at some past interspecies hanky panky.
Perhaps advancements in DNA recovery will one day allow scientists to make similar estimates for the Lapedo child.
The study was published in Science Advances.
