Neandertals Grew Like Us

Hot on the heels of studies that last week argued Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) genetically diverged as much as 500,000 years ago, a new paper says the children of both hominid branches grew at a strongly similar pace.

University College London researcher Christopher Dean and colleagues used high-resolution imaging techniques to probe the insides of two Neanderthal molars, found at La Chaise-de-Vouthon in western France and dated to around 130,000 years ago.

They looked for telltale ridges and patterns deemed to indicate a child's growth from birth and to the length of childhood.

H. sapiens and Neanderthal teeth point to similar timelines for reaching adulthood, says the study, which appears on Thursday in Nature, the weekly British science journal.

"Our prediction for first permanent molar eruption in this Neanderthal (is) of 6.8 years... This all points to a dental development schedule that was most like that in modern humans," says Dean.

"At 130,000 years we find no evidence of foreshortened periods of growth or of unusual stress in these Neanderthals that would set them apart from modern humans."

The dental debate came to the crunch in April 2004, when Spanish palaeontologists said Neanderthals became adults by the age of 15, compared to 18-20 years for H. sapiens, which thus showed Neanderthals to be "a distinct species" from humans.