• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

How A Human-Neanderthal Hybrid Child Rewrote Human History

May 8, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Around 24,500 years ago, the body of a 4-year-old child was wrapped in an ochre-dyed shroud and lowered into a burial pit in the Lapedo Valley of central Portugal. Unlike any whippersnapper alive today, however, this extraordinary child exhibited a unique blend of modern human and Neanderthal features, disproving everything we thought we knew about the history of our species.

Advertisement

Known as the Lapedo Child, the youngster’s complete skeleton was discovered in 1998. Until then, anthropologists had assumed that modern humans evolved in East Africa before spreading across Eurasia and replacing the more archaic hominids that lived there – including Neanderthals.

Advertisement

This narrative supposed that we and our ancient relatives were completely separate species that could not interbreed, and that our expansion resulted in the extinction of our more primitive cousins. The Lapedo Child ripped up this script, prompting the discoverers to propose that modern humans did mate with Neanderthals, and that the genetic code of this extinct species persisted within the hybrid lineage that flowed from the loins of our cross-pollinating ancestors.

Thought to have been a male, the child himself possessed the chin and inner ear of an anatomically modern human, along with the stocky frame and limbs of a Neanderthal. Such a finding initially sent shockwaves through the anthropological world, sparking fierce debate as to what this all meant for human history.

In their original study on the skeleton, the authors note that the child lived several thousand years after Neanderthals had supposedly disappeared, suggesting that these ancestral traits must have been deeply ingrained within the human genome and that the young boy was therefore “the descendant of extensively admixed populations.” In other words, interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals didn’t just happen once or twice, but occurred on a population level, resulting in significant hybridization.

This, in turn, implies that Neanderthals didn’t simply die out when modern humans came along, but repeatedly hooked up with their new neighbours to the extent that they partially merged with them.

Advertisement

At the time of the discovery, this idea was seen as pretty radical and somewhat shocking, prompting some scholars to refute the original findings. One analysis, for instance, concluded that the Lapedo Child was not a hybrid after all but, was just an oddly-shaped modern human sprog.

However, the admixture theory was finally proven in 2010 when researchers sequenced the Neanderthal genome. In doing so, they revealed that all modern non-African populations contain between 1 and 4 percent Neanderthal DNA, thus confirming that our ancient ancestors did interbreed with these extinct hominids.

Thankfully, our phenotypes have straightened out somewhat over the millennia and we no longer possess the Neanderthal physique. However, like the Lapedo Child, those of us who hail from outside of Africa are all modern human-Neanderthal hybrids.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Soccer-Premier clubs could face sanctions over South American players
  2. Biden nominee for key China export post expects Huawei to remain blacklisted
  3. New Images From Inside Fukushima Nuclear Plant Are Causing Big Worries
  4. 100-Year Floods May Be Looming If We Don’t Change Our Ways

Source Link: How A Human-Neanderthal Hybrid Child Rewrote Human History

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Newly Discovered Cell Structure Might Hold Key To Understanding Devastating Genetic Disorders
  • What Is Kakeya’s Needle Problem, And Why Do We Want To Solve It?
  • “I Wasn’t Prepared For The Sheer Number Of Them”: Cave Of Mummified Never-Before-Seen Eyeless Invertebrates Amazes Scientists
  • Asteroid Day At 10: How The World Is More Prepared Than Ever To Face Celestial Threats
  • What Happened When A New Zealand Man Fell Butt-First Onto A Powerful Air Hose
  • Ancient DNA Confirms Women’s Unexpected Status In One Of The Oldest Known Neolithic Settlements
  • Earth’s Weather Satellites Catch Cloud Changes… On Venus
  • Scientists Find Common Factors In People Who Have “Out-Of-Body” Experiences
  • Shocking Photos Reveal Extent Of Overfishing’s Impact On “Shrinking” Cod
  • Direct Fusion Drive Could Take Us To Sedna During Its Closest Approach In 11,000 Years
  • Earth’s Energy Imbalance Is More Than Double What It Should Be – And We Don’t Know Why
  • We May Have Misjudged A Fundamental Fact About The Cambrian Explosion
  • The Shoebill Is A Bird So Bizarre That Some People Don’t Even Believe It’s Real
  • Colossal’s “Dire Wolves” Are Now 6 Months Old – And They’ve Doubled In Size
  • How To Fake A Fossil: Find Out More In Issue 36 Of CURIOUS – Out Now
  • Is It True Earth Used To Take 420 Days To Orbit The Sun?
  • One Of The Ocean’s “Most Valuable Habitats” Grows The Only Flowers Known To Bloom In Seawater
  • World’s Largest Digital Camera Snaps 2,104 New Asteroids In 10 Hours, Mice With 2 Dads Father Their Own Offspring, And Much More This Week
  • Simplest Explanation For “Anomalous” Signals Coming From Underneath Antarctica Ruled Out
  • “Lizard Shampoo” And Pagan Texts Suggest “Dark Age” Medicine Wasn’t So Dark After All
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version