Skeletal admixture evidence in paleoanthropology holds that anatomically mosaic fossil remains — a single individual combining diagnostically Neanderthal traits (shortened distal limb proportions, robusticity, particular dental morphology) with diagnostically anatomically-modern traits (a developed mental eminence or chin) — constitute morphological evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthal and modern human populations rather than intraspecific variation or isolated hybrid events. Because the fossil postdates the estimated regional contact horizon by many millennia, the retention of ancestral Neanderthal anatomy implies gene flow at the population level, making admixture the norm rather than a rare encounter, and by the biological species criterion implies Neanderthals were not a separate species but a divergent population within the human lineage. The concept sits at the intersection of paleoanthropology, human evolutionary biology, and paleogenomics, where skeletal morphology and genomic ancestry estimates function as independent lines of evidence bearing on the same admixture hypothesis, and it stands in opposition to strict replacement ("out of Africa with total extinction of contemporaries") models of modern human origins.
Skeletal admixture evidence in paleoanthropology holds that anatomically mosaic fossil remains — a single individual combining diagnostically Neanderthal traits (shortened distal limb proportions, ro…