BY REUTERS

A fossilized skeleton of a five-year-old child discovered in a prehistoric cave about 90 years ago in the then British-ruled Palestine, has pushed back the timeline for human-Neanderthal interbreeding by over 100,000 years, researchers in Israel and France said on Wednesday (August 20).

The partial skeleton was studied and analyzed by an international team led by researchers from Tel Aviv University and the French National Centre for Scientific Research. The findings were published in the journal l’Anthropologie.

The fossil was originally excavated in the 1930s from Skhul Cave on Mount Carmel, in what is today northern Israel.

The Israeli team, led by Professor Israel Hershkovitz, said the child skeleton exhibited a unique blend of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens traits.

It said its skull showed a cranial curvature typical of Homo sapiens, while the jawbone and vascular patterns revealed Neanderthal characteristics.

Advanced imaging techniques revealed that the child lived around 140,000 years ago, making it the oldest known hybrid between the two human species, which were considered two different species until recently.

“What we managed to show is that actually Neanderthals and Homo sapiens start interbreeding, not around 60,000 to 40,000 years ago, but around 140,000 years ago – 100,000 years earlier than most people think,” said Hershkovitz.

The Tel Aviv team also presented an AI-generated image depicting a hypothetical family with a Neanderthal father, a Homo sapiens mother, and a hybrid child.

Neanderthals, formally called Homo neanderthalensis, were more robustly built than Homo sapiens and had larger brows.

They lived from around 430,000 years ago until their disappearance relatively soon after Homo sapiens – a species that arose roughly 300,000 years ago in Africa – trekked into areas Neanderthals inhabited in the Middle East, Europe and Asia.

Most people today have genes inherited from Neanderthals, roughly 1-2% of their DNA.

When asked about the impact the study might have on understanding human behavior, Hershkovitz said that humans may not be inherently aggressive, citing evidence suggesting a long history of coexistence with another species.