The Neanderthal within

摘要

After the boy died, he was buried in a shallow grave along with some pierced shells and red ochre, as was customary among his people. There he lay for 24,000 years until his near-complete remains were unearthed by anthropologist Joao Zilhao at Lagar Velho in Portugal. He was expecting to find the remains of an early modern human -Neanderthals were thought to be long extinct by that time - but the boy's skeleton was different. Realising that he had something unusual and potentially significant on his hands, Zilhao called in Erik Trinkaus, an expert on Stone Age humans at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.