Fragments of bones
Scientists used fragments of the child's right forearm bone to date the skeletal remains. Cidália Duarte
In 1998, archaeologists discovered the skeletal remains of a child in Portugal’s Lapedo Valley. When the team took a closer look at the ochre-stained bones, they were surprised to find that the “Lapedo child” had a mix of both Neanderthal and human features. Using radiocarbon dating, they tried to figure out when the child had been buried, but they couldn’t determine a reliable time frame.
Now, using a novel dating method, a group of researchers—including some who originally found the bones—has deduced that the child was buried between 27,780 and 28,550 years ago, according to a new paper published Friday in the journal Science Advances.
“Being able to successfully date the child felt like giving them back a tiny piece of their story, which is a huge privilege,” says study co-author Bethan Linscott, a geochemist now at the University of Miami, to Adithi Ramakrishnan of the Associated Press.
The new date range adds to scientists’ growing understanding of the relationship between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. Ancient DNA indicates the two species interbred for thousands of years, before Neanderthals vanished around 40,000 years ago.
Illustrations of bones
These illustrations show the skeleton's positioning at the burial site alongside animal remains.
Scientists have long puzzled over the Lapedo child’s curious blend of human and Neanderthal traits. The skeleton had mostly human-like features, but it also had the body proportions, jawbone and pitted occipital bone at the back of the skull that were characteristic of Neanderthals.
At the time of the skeleton’s discovery, the idea that humans and Neanderthals had hybridized was not mainstream—the Neanderthal genome wasn’t sequenced until more than a decade later, revealing how modern humans have varying amounts of Neanderthal DNA.
In their original 1999 study, the researchers suggested the Lapedo child was descended from humans and Neanderthals that had interbred long before. The idea that a human and Neanderthal had directly hybridized to birth the child is complicated by the known timeline of Neanderthal extinction: The species had largely disappeared more than 10,000 years before the Lapedo child lived, though Neanderthals vanished at different times throughout Europe.
The newly established timeline for the child’s life provides additional information for archaeologists to consider as they try to unravel the mysteries associated with the remains. It may also offer new insights into the overlap between humans and Neanderthals, as well as clues about Neanderthals’ eventual disappearance.
“While we do not have any genetic evidence from [the site], providing additional confirmation on the age of the site allows us to better understand, on the basis of morphology, how the process of replacement of Neanderthals by Homo sapiens may have played out,” says Adam Van Arsdale, a paleoanthropologist at Wellesley College who was not involved with the research, to Live Science’s Kristina Killgrove.
Green plants growing around cliffside
The burial site was discovered in Portugal's Lapedo Valley in 1998. João Zilhã
To determine the child’s age, scientists extracted a specific amino acid called hydroxyproline from collagen in the bones. This technique is good for dating contaminated archaeological samples such as the Lapedo child, Linscott tells Gizmodo’s Isaac Schultz.
“Hydroxyproline is rare elsewhere in nature and essentially acts a bit like a collagen ‘fingerprint,’ so by dating hydroxyproline, we can be sure that the carbon we’re dating is coming directly from the bone and not from contamination,” Linscott adds.
The team used the same technique to date other artifacts found in the child’s grave, including rabbit bones, red deer bones and charcoal. Their analysis suggests the charcoal and red deer bones were much older than the child and were likely already at the site when the child was buried or were used to position the body within the burial pit. The rabbit bones, by contrast, appear to have been placed there at the same time as the child, possibly as a burial offering.
Prehistoric humans had used the site for roughly 300 years as a place to butcher and process animal carcasses. But after the child’s burial, the location was abandoned for more than 2,000 years.
Scientists aren’t sure why, but they say the child’s demise likely played a role.
“Perhaps the death event resulted in the site becoming taboo and a social rule to avoid it was put in place until the memory of the event faded away,” says study co-author João Zilhão, an archaeologist at the University of Lisbon, to IFLScience’s Benjamin Taub.
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Sarah Kuta | READ MORE
Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.
Filed Under: Archaeology, Bones, DNA, Genetics, Human Evolution, Neanderthal, New Research, Reproduction