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Credit, National Museum of Archeology of Portugal
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Visual reconstruction of the boy from Lapedo
In 1998, the skeleton known as Lapedo’s boy was discovered at Lagar Velho in the Lapedo Valley, about 150 km from Lisbon.
He was around 4 years old and was buried at this site in Portugal around 29,000 years ago.
Something else about her body caught the attention of archaeologists who began excavating the site.
“Something about the child’s anatomy was strange. When we found the jaw, we knew it would be a modern human, but when we uncovered the complete skeleton (…) we saw that it had the body proportions of a Neanderthal,” explained the BBC João Zilhão, archaeologist and leader of the team who worked on the discovery.
“The only thing that could explain this combination of traits is that the child was actually evidence of Neanderthals and modern humans interbreeding.
If we go back to what was thought about human evolution in the late 1990s when it was assumed that Neanderthals and modern humans were different species and therefore interbreeding was unthinkable it is not surprising that the vast majority of experts on the interpretation of Zilhao believed and his team somewhat exaggerated.
But his theory started a revolution in evolutionary studies.
Almost intact skeleton
Credit, National Museum of Archeology of Portugal
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The boy’s skeleton was almost intact
The community to which the boy belonged was huntergatherer and nomadic by nature.
As archaeologist Ana Cristina Araújo explained to BBC Reel, after the boy’s death, the group dug a hole in the ground, burned a pine branch and laid his body, wrapped in an ocher shroud, over the ashes.
“We don’t know (for certain) if it was a boy or a girl, but there is some evidence that it was a boy.”
As for the cause of death, the archaeologist says there is no evidence of illness or a fall. Therefore, it is possible to imagine a variety of scenarios.
“The boy could have eaten a poisonous mushroom or drowned.”
His body remained buried for thousands of years until it was accidentally discovered in 1998 with the skeleton almost intact when landowners began excavating to construct a series of terrace structures.
After being transferred to the National Museum in Lisbon, they began to study it in detail.
Credit, National Museum of Archeology of Portugal
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Archaeologists found that the legs were shorter than normal for a boy his age.
“The leg bones were shorter than normal for a child his age. How could the legs look like a Neanderthal? Some teeth also looked like a Neanderthal while others looked like a modern human. How can that be explained?” asked Zilhão.
The researchers explored two hypotheses. One was that the child was the result of a cross between a Neanderthal and a modern human.
However, Zilhao was not convinced. If this was a unique, rare, sporadic event, it was almost impossible to find 30,000 years later.
The second hypothesis held that Neanderthals and Sapiens had regular sexual intercourse with each other.
“We knew that the moment of contact (between the two) in the Iberian Peninsula (…) was about 37,000 years ago. If the skeleton was from that period, the first theory might work. But if the boy was from a time much later, the implications had to be that we were looking at a populationlevel process, not a chance encounter between two individuals,” says Zilhão.
Radiocarbon dating has settled the matter: Lapedo’s child was 29,000 years old.
“If people living in this part of the world still have anatomical evidence of this ancestral Neanderthal population so many millennia after the time of contact, it must be because interbreeding didn’t just happen once, it was the norm.”
The strength of the evidence found by the team in Portugal meant that other specialists had to seriously consider this hypothesis.
This discovery changed our understanding of Neanderthals as a species.
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Zilhao says the crossover theory surprised researchers at first.
Research suggests that Neanderthals are not a different species. “We overinterpret small differences in the facial skeleton or in the robustness of the skeleton,” says Zilhão.
Other later fossil discoveries with characteristics similar to the Lapedo boy reinforced the hybridization theory, which was later confirmed when researchers sequenced the entire Neanderthal genome.
So we know that Europeans and Asians can have up to 4% Neanderthal DNA.
“This is not to say that there are 2% or 4% (Neanderthals) in each of us. In fact, if you add up all the parts of the Neanderthal genome that still exist, that’s almost 50% or 70% of what was specifically Neanderthal. So the Neanderthal genome was almost completely preserved,” explains the researcher.
This knowledge “enriches our understanding of human evolution,” Zilhao says, rather than “believing that we descended from just a very small population that lived somewhere in Africa 250,000 years ago and that everyone else who lived then just disappeared.” .”