The skull of a girl who is thought to be the daughter of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens parents
The skull of a 5 -year -old girl who lived 140,000 years ago was discovered. It has similarities to the modern Homo sapiens and Neanderthal. Your parents may even have belonged to different species.
A 140,000 -year -old hominid skull from Israel, probably belonged to a Hybrid Child of Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens.
The conclusion is from a study in the latest edition of Anthropology.
As the 5 -year -old girl’s skull remembers was originally unearthed from the Skhul cave on Mount Carmelo in 1929.
In total, these early excavations revealed seven adults, three children, and a set of bones that belonged to 16 hominids – all later attributed to Homo Sapiens.
However, the classification of the child’s skull has been contested almost a century ago, in part because the jaw is different of the typical jaws of Homo sapiens.
The original works have the hypothesis of belonging to a transition hominid called Paleoanthropus palestinensisbut later investigations concluded that it probably belonged to Homo Sapiens.
Discovery of a “hybrid”
The new study now used computed tomography in the skull and compared it with other known neanderthal children.
It was discovered, on the one hand that the jaw had neanderthal characteristics distinct.
On the other, the rest of the skull was consistent with that of a homo sapiens.
It was out there that the researchers theorized this 5 -year -old girl was a hybrid, whose parents were of different species.
“I have long thought that hybrids were not viable and I still think they were mostly abortive. This skeleton reveals that, however, they were possible, although this girl lived only 5 years,” he told New Scientist, one of the study authors, Anne Dambricourt Ditfrom the Institute of Human Paleontology in France.
“Human populations are variable and there may be a lot of variability in their appearance and physical form, even without mixing with old groups such as neanderthals,” he admits, on the other hand.
In addition, we know that Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals have changed genes many times during the last 200,000 years.
Although the new work advances our understanding of this important children’s skull, We cannot definitely identify the child as a hybrid without first extracting your DNA – what the investigators could not do.
