Dr. Thacker's talk is titled "What happened to the Neandertals? Morphology, identity and behavior from the final refugium"
Abstract: The discovery of a 25,000 year old human burial in a rockshelter context at Lapedo, Portugal made world headlines in Spring of 1999, as the 4 year old male skeleton evidenced mixed morphological characteristics between modern humans and our immediate European antecedents, the Neandertals. Iberia, specifically south of the Ebro drainage, has consistently yielded the latest radiocarbon dates for Neandertal specimens throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia, as definitively modern human anatomy and material culture does not appear in southern Spain and Portugal until about 28,000 years before present. Archaeological remains recovered from the site of Vale de Obidos, Portugal in the summer of 1999 reveal that the human groups exhibiting genetic admixture and interbreeding organized space and their technology in a fully modern manner, a conclusion verified through comparison with historically and ethnographically known hunter-gatherer groups.