It rejects the extreme Out of Africa model of modern human emergence, which proposes that early moderns originating in Africa … displaced all other humans in other regions.
On a chilly afternoon in late November 1998, while inspecting a rock-shelter in central Portugal’s Lapedo Valley, two archaeology scouts spotted loose sediment in a rodent hole along the shelter’s back wall. Knowing that burrowing animals often bring deeper materials to the surface, one of the scouts reached in to see what might have been unearthed. When he withdrew his hand, he held in it something extraordinary: bones of a human child buried nearly 25,000 years ago.Subsequent excavation of the burial revealed that the four-year-old had been ceremonially covered with red ochre and laid on a bed of burnt vegetation, along with pierced deer teeth and a marine shell-in the Gravettian style known from modern humans of that time across Europe.
Based on the abrupt cultural transition seen in archaeological remains, it seemed likely that when Cro-magnon suddenly appeared into the area 37,000 years ago in western Eurpe, they interbred with the Neanderthals. So it stood to reason that this specimen, called Lagar Velho 1, represented an early modern child. In fact, it didn’t occur to us at first that it could be anything else.This wonderfully complete skeleton does have a suite of features that align it predominantly with early modern Europeans.