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Twenty-five thousand years later, in December 1998, the discovery of the child's fossilized remains launched another of the nasty academic tumults so common in the field of paleoanthropology. This one, however, was more bitter than usual, and more visible, because it was not confined to the stately rhythms and limited circulation of journal publication. This dispute was taken to the Web, and, as one observer put it, it quickly developed into "excursions and alarums all over the Internet."

The "battle of the bones" began when the child's skeleton was examined by an international team headed by noted Neanderthal expert Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in St. Louis, who was surprised to discover an unusual combination of features in the bones. The Lagar Velho child seemed to have characteristics of both Neanderthals and modern humans, and to Trinkaus that meant that the child was an "intermediate" form, a kind of "missing link" between what he sees as two different species of humans, the Neanderthal and the so-called Cro-Magnon. To a scientific community still debating whether Neanderthals contributed to our modern line, Trinkaus' hypothesis -- reported in the European press as "The 'Clan of the Cave Bear' Love Child" -- was a bombshell.

Trinkaus and his team, which included João Zilhão, director of the Portuguese Institute of Antiquities, published the details of the skeleton and the team's Neanderthal-modern "admixture" hypothesis in the June 22 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The issue also featured a commentary by Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History and Jeffrey Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh which dismissed the Trinkaus team's conclusions. And that's when the real trouble began.

Trinkaus later claimed that the commentary implied that he and his colleagues "didn't know their ass from their elbow." Most observers say that the Tattersall and Schwartz paper was polite and discreetly worded, but another anthropologist familiar with the players thinks that Trinkaus' fierce reaction to it was nevertheless inevitable: "Erik," he said, "has never taken criticism well."

PNAS does not publish responses to commentaries, so the furious Trinkaus and Zilhão resorted to the Internet. They posted a lengthy and venomous "correction" on the Instituto Portugues de Arqueologia Web site on June 24, in the form of a scathing treatise, which they also e-mailed to colleagues worldwide.

Next page | Who wants to be related to a Neanderthal?