Missing Neanderthal Baby Skeleton Found in French Museum

A French scientist has found the skeleton of a Neanderthal baby in a museum where it had been lost for 80 years.

Neanderthals - hulking, wide-nostrilled and adapted for survival in the Ice Age - were the first Europeans. They disappeared 30,000 years ago under competition from humans arriving from Africa as economic migrants.

The baby, known as Le Moustier 2, was four months old when it died, more than 40,000 years ago. It was first found in 1914 at Le Moustier in the Dordogne. That year France was invaded by Germany.

In 1921 a palaeontologist called Peyrony described the find. After that, the bones disappeared: they were thought to have been lost in Paris. Twenty years later, France was occupied by Germany again: collections were packed away, or looted, curators fled and museums closed.

It was not until 1996 that Bruno Maureille, an anthropologist at the University of Bordeaux, began a survey of the collections in the French national museum of prehistory in Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil, in the Dordogne. There he found the bones of a newborn child, some still embedded in the telltale mix of garnets, mica and green hornblendes of the Le Moustier cliff. With them were flint flakes and fragments of ibex that could also help place the find.

He looked again at Peyrony's notes. There was no mention of the bones ever having been sent to Paris. More details confirmed his suspicions: this was the lost infant of Le Moustier, he reports in Nature today.

Furthermore, he confirmed that bones at another museum in France must originally have belonged to Le Moustier 2. Now the skeleton of the baby lacks only shoulder-blades and a pubic bone, making it one of the most complete Neanderthal skeletons ever found.

Robert Kruszynski of the Natural History Museum in London said the find was of enormous importance. It supported other evidence that Neanderthals grew up far faster than modern humans. "They matured around 11," he said. "Life was tough. I have totted up 12 Neanderthals who died below 16. The idea was to churn out kids as fast as possible."

Neanderthals take the name from the first discovery in the Neander valley in Germany; their culture, however, is often called Mousterian after the finds in France. Unlike Homo sapiens, who dined happily off fish and small mammals, the Neanderthals went only after big game, consuming perhaps 6,000 calories a day.

"They buried their dead. They had an idea of identity, of self," said Dr Kruszynski.