Fossil Teeth of Neanderthals Reveal Fast Track to Maturity
This entry was posted on 12/1/2010 3:14 PM and is filed under Article.
Modern humans benefit from slower growth, longer lives, researchers say
FRIDAY, Nov. 19 (HealthDay News) -- Children today take longer to mature than
Neanderthal children did, which may have given modern humans an evolutionary
advantage, researchers suggest.
In the study, a multinational team of scientists used synchrotron X-ray
imaging to study the fossil teeth of young Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.
"Teeth are remarkable time recorders, capturing each day of growth much like
rings in trees reveal yearly progress. Even more impressive is the fact that our
first molars contain a tiny 'birth certificate' and finding this birth line
allows us to calculate exactly how old a juvenile was when it died," Tanya
Smith, a researcher at Harvard University and the Max-Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology, said in a news release from the European Synchrotron
Radiation Facility.
The fossil teeth were analyzed at the facility, located in France. The
scientists found that Neanderthal teeth grew much faster than the teeth of
modern humans.
The longer maturation process in modern human children may lead to additional
learning and complex cognition, giving humans a competitive advantage over
Neanderthals, the study authors noted.
The shift from a primitive "live fast and die young" strategy to a "live slow
and grow old" strategy has helped make modern humans one of the most successful
organisms on the planet, according to the scientists.
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