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Author/s: Robert Kunzig
Issue: August, 1999
Does the 25,000-year-old body of a child found in Portugal make it more likely that they are our ancestors?
What you want, when you hold a pendant fashioned 35,000 years ago by a Neanderthal--a fox's tooth with a tiny hole for a leather string--what you want is something only the movies can give. A close-up, in the lab's neon light, on the mottled canine between your fingers, the focus so tight you can see the scratches made by the stone tool. The picture fades, and next you see the same tooth in different hands, stronger ones with beefy fingers: the hands of the craftsman. He is piercing the tooth with a sharpened piece of flint. Behind him squats a rough tent of hides stretched over mammoth tusks; behind that the dark mouth of a cave. Before and below him a river meanders lazily between birches and willows. Reindeer graze on the far bank. On an early morning in spring, in northern Burgundy during the Ice Age, the light coming in low over the far bluff catches the craftsman's pale, weathered face. It is a human face. The eyes, under the jutting brow, are human eyes, alive with concentration, with memories of other seasons at this place, with intelligence and hope.
No, hold it: Maybe those Neanderthal eyes are blank as a cat's, all surface, with nothing behind them but dumb instinct and a bit of animal cunning--no memories, no plan, no clue.
Back to spring 1999 and the lab, at a modern campus of the University of Paris. An archeologist named Dominique Baffler holds the tooth. For the past few days newspapers the world over have been reporting the discovery in Portugal of the skeleton of a 4-year-old child, dead for 25,000 years. The discoverers, led by Portuguese archeologist Joao Zilhao, are making a ground-breaking claim, that the skeleton shows traces of both Neanderthal and modern human ancestry; evidence that modern humans did not simply extinguish the Neanderthals, as many researchers had come to think. Instead the two kinds of human were so alike that in Portugal, at least, they intermingled--and made love--for thousands of years.
The claim is controversial. So, too, and for similar reasons, is the fox tooth Baffler is holding. A collection of such ornaments is arrayed on the table in front of her, along with delicate bone tools--awls for punching through animals hides, needles for sewing or perhaps for pinning up hair. All these artifacts were dug from the mouth of a limestone cave four decades ago at Arcy-sur-Cure, a hundred miles southeast of Paris. Just in the past year, though, the Arcy artifacts have become the subject of heated debate. Zilhao, Baffler, and several French colleagues claim the artifacts show that Neanderthals were not inferior to our ancestors, the Cro-Magnons. Independently; they underwent the same leap into modernity, the same emergence of symbolic thought that millennia later allowed Cro-Magnons to paint on cave walls.
A fox-tooth pendant is not a cave painting, as Baffler well knows, for she studies those paintings too. But it is a symbolic statement. "Oh, it's beautiful," she says quietly; turning the Neanderthal pendant in her fingers, peering at it over her glasses. "It's beautiful and it's moving. A 35,000-year-old bijou--isn't that moving?"
Analysis of the skeletal remains of this four-year-old boy has revealed that he may be a Neandertal-Cro-Magnon hybrid. (Courtesy João Zilhão)
nalysis of the skeletal remains of a four-year-old child buried in a Portuguese rock-shelter 25,000 to 24,500 years ago has yielded startling evidence that early modern humans and Neandertals may have interbred. While the boy's prominent chin, tooth size, and pelvic measurements marked him as a Cro-Magnon, or fully modern human, his stocky body and short legs indicate Neandertal heritage, says Erik Trinkaus, a paleoanthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. Interbreeding could answer the vexed question of the fate of the Neandertals, the last of whom disappeared from the Iberian Peninsula 28,000 years ago.
Trinkaus was summoned to Portugal after archaeologists searching for rock art in the Lapedo Valley, 85 miles north of Lisbon, found the burial this past December. João Zilhão of the University of Lisbon, the excavation's director, described the skeleton's preservation as "miraculous"--only the skull and right arm were badly broken. The boy is the first Palaeolithic burial ever excavated on the Iberian Peninsula, and among the oldest modern humans ever scientifically excavated.
Trinkaus, who compared the boy's limb proportions with those of Neandertal skeletons, including some children, says that the body is the first definite evidence of a mixture between Neandertal and early humans. While full Neandertals are thought to have been extinct for 4,000 years before the boy was born, he appears to be a descendant of generations of Neandertal-Cro-Magnon hybrids. Neandertals belong to our species and contributed their genes to European ancestry, he says.--SPENCER P.M. HARRINGTON
They could make love all they want; there is no real evidence of interbreeding or of mixed offspring other than the one freak skeleton which could be a birth defect or an indicatation that the one or two children ever born of such unions never lived any longer than that.
The problem is that given the proximity of the two groups over long time spans, there should be LOTS AND LOTS of evidence of interbreeding and mixed skeletons of all ages and, as usual, all they can ever find is the one freak skeleton and they want to claim a victory for evolution on that basis.
Likewise, I could show you a skeleton of a snake with two heads. That does not mean that all snakes of that generation of snakes had two heads, or that two headed snakes were common then, or that two headed snakes are terribly viable.
