Zilhao&Trinkaus (eds) - Portrait of the Artist as a Child ~ The Gravettian Human Skeleton from the Abrigo do Lagar Velho and its Archaeological Context.pdf

In August of 1998, the two of us participated in the first Gibraltar conference on the Neandertals
and modern human origins, held to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the discovery of
the Forbes’ Quarry Neandertal cranium. At that conference, which integrated various aspects
of Late Pleistocene human ecology, behavior and biology, the focus seemed to keep coming
back to the two questions which have plagued European Late Pleistocene paleoanthropology
for much of the past century. How similar were the Neandertals to early modern humans in
their behavior and adaptive patterns, and how closely related were these two groups of
humans? Since southern Iberia appeared, in 1998, to be the last refugium of the Neandertals,
the focus of the conference, on both of these general issues and the natures of the Late Pleistocene
changes in Iberia, seemed to bring the various questions into focus, if not any closer
to resolution.




It is our hope that our presentation of the remains of the Gravettian child from the Lapedo Valley and the contents of the site into
which it was buried after its untimely death 25 millennia ago will contribute a little to our
understanding of the processes that led to the emergence of early modern humans, and of the
people who were involved in that process.