• 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

  • DNA From Greenland Sled Dogs – Maybe The World’s Oldest Breed – Reveals 1,000 Years Of Arctic History
  • Why Doesn’t Moonrise Shift By The Same Amount Each Night?
  • Moa De-Extinction, Fashionable Chimps, And Robot Surgery – No Human Required
  • “Human”: Powerful New Images Mark The Most Scientifically Accurate “Hyper-Real 3D Models Of Human Species Ever”
  • Did We Accidentally Leave Life On The Moon In 2019 – And Could We Revive It?
  • 1.8 Million Years Ago, Two Extinct Humans Had One Of The Gnarliest Deaths In History
  • “Powerful Image” Of One Of The World’s Rarest Tigers Exposes The Real Danger In Taman Negara
  • Evolution, Domestication, And A Lot Of Very Good Boys: How Wolves Became Dogs
  • Why Do Orcas Have White Spots Near Their Eyes?
  • Tomb Of First King Of Ancient Maya City Discovered In Belize
  • The Real Reason The Tip Of Your Tape Measure Wiggles Like That
  • The “Haunting” Last Message From NASA’s Opportunity Rover, Sent From Inside A Planet-Wide Storm
  • Adorable Video Proves Not All Gorillas Hate The Rain. It Might Even Win One A Mate
  • 5,000-Year-Old Rock Art May Show One Of Ancient Egypt’s First Rulers
  • Alzheimer’s-Linked Protein Levels “20 Times Higher” In Newborn Babies – What Does This Mean?
  • Americans Were Asked If They Thought Civil War Was Coming. The Results Were Unexpected
  • Voyager 1 & 2 Could Be Detected From Almost A Light-Year Away With Our Current Technology
  • Dams Have Nudged Earth’s Poles By Over 1 Meter In The Past 200 Years
  • This Sugar Could Be A Cure For Male Pattern Baldness – And It’s Been In Our Bodies All Along
  • “Cosmic Immigrants”: Daytime Star Seen In 1604 May Be An “Alien Type Ia Supernova”
  • 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