In April 1999, the discovery of a human skeleton from Lagar Velho in Portugal was announced in the media, followed by a scientific paper a couple of months later (Duarte et al. 1999).
The skeleton is of a young boy, about 4 years in age, who was deliberately buried about 24,500 years ago. According to the paper's authors, which included Neandertal expert Erik Trinkaus, the skeleton contains a mixture of features from both modern humans and Neandertals, and is best explained as being a hybrid.
And because it is dated to be at least 4,000 years more recent than the last known Neandertals, they consider it to be not the result of a direct interbreeding, but the descendant of a hybrid population which persisted for thousands of years.
If true, this would strongly support the claim that Neandertals should be considered a subspecies of modern humans (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis), rather than a separate species, Homo neanderthalensis.
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Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. |
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