Child's bones found in Neandertal burial.

The infant's delicate skeleton lay on its back, arms extended and legs bent upward, at the bottom of a 5-foot-deep pit someone had dug perhaps 50,000 to 70,000 years ago. A limestone slab nudged against the top of the child's skull, and a small, triangular piece of flint rested at about the spot where the tot's heart had once beat.

A team of Japanese and Syrian scientists unearthed the prehistoric youngster in a cave at Dederiyeh, a site located near the Syrian city of Aleppo. They consider the skeleton to be that of a Neandertal and call the discovery the best evidence yet of Neandertal burial practices.

"This child was no more than 2 years old, and its anatomical features are clearly those of a Neandertal," asserts excavation director Takeru Akazawa, an anthropologist at the University of Tokyo.

Akazawa and his coworkers uncovered the infant's skeleton in August 1993. They describe the find in the Oct. 19 Nature.

Dating of animal teeth and burnt flint from sediment associated with the child's skeleton, based on separate techniques for assessing the accumulation of radioactivity in buried objects, is now under way.

The Dederiyeh infant evidences much the same anatomy as the 60,000-year-old partial skeleton of a Neandertal baby discovered in an Israeli cave, Akazawa holds (SN: 1/1/94, p.5). Key Neandertal features include a bony ridge at the back of the skull, a sloping face, a wide, protruding nose, receding cheeks, and a chinless jaw.

Stages of tooth eruption and development in the specimen indicate that the infant had reached no more than 2 years of age, Akazawa contends. However, the width of the braincase roughly matches that of the average 6-year-old in modern Japan, suggesting that the Dederiyeh infant had a relatively large brain for its age, he asserts.

The skeleton came from soil that has also yielded flaked stone artifacts resembling those found at Israel's Kebara cave, another Neandertal site. Akazawa supports the theory, proposed in 1992 by Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard University, that the tool-making styles of modern humans who reached the Middle East from Africa about 100,000 years ago are distinct from those of Neandertals who fled a frigid Europe for the Middle East around 70,000 years ago.

Bar-Yosef and other researchers from around the world will meet with Akazawa in Tokyo this November to discuss the implications of the Dederiyeh discovery.