Until now, scientists had very little information about Neanderthal babies, our ancestors having lived 400,000 years ago. While we still don’t know at what age infants started walking, we now know what they looked like, thanks to a new study published in the scientific journal Current Biology.
Adult Neanderthals had bodies adapted to the cold, very stocky and muscular. Their compact silhouette also helped them retain heat in a much colder climate. The babies appear to have been much larger than those of today, explains New Scientist. However, they were a species very close to ours and many modern humans still have 1 to 2% Neanderthal DNA. So how can we explain this difference?
Amud 7 the big baby
For this study, Ella Been, professor at Ono Academic College in Israel, and her colleagues conducted a detailed anatomical analysis of the almost complete skeleton of a baby Neanderthal who lived in the territory of present-day Israel, between 51,000 and 56,000 years ago. Known as Amud 7, the infant was discovered in 1992 in a cave. Its sex could not be determined.
Based on the stage of teething, Amud 7 was approximately six months old at the time of his death. But in terms of bone length and brain development, its measurements are more comparable to those of a modern human aged 12 to 14 months. When the team of scientists compared this data with that of two other Neanderthal infants, they observed the same trend.
It is therefore very likely that Neanderthal and Homo sapiens babies had very different growth rates, implying higher energy requirements in young Neanderthal children. In fact, a baby a few months old could eat like a current child over a year old. For the research team, this is surely explained by the need to survive in an environment much more hostile than ours.
However, these growth differences seem to disappear around the age of 7 and the growth of both species then follows approximately the same curve. According to Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, the Amud 7 fossil provides a real breakthrough in the knowledge of Homo neanderthalensis.
