The discovery of a 14-month-old baby has proven the opposite
Strange as it may seem, human childhood is an evolutionary oddity. And to understand it, you just have to see that, unlike other primates, Homo sapiens we take a long time to developmature and be independent outside the family niche. But… Are we the only ones who have this ‘bad’ evolution? To resolve this question, science has gone to see our evolutionary cousins, the neanderthalsto see if they were also in a hurry to grow or if they were developing in slow motion. How it has been seen. Today there is no time machine that allows us to go back to the moment when the Neanderthals took over the planet, but we can ‘see’ it through the remains that are found. Here specifically, science has analyzed the remains of Amud 7, a Neanderthal baby between 6 and 14 months old that has been found in Israel. A puzzle. The study of infant skeletons in the fossil record, the truth is that it is very complex, because baby bones are fragile, small and rarely survive the passage of time. However, the team led by researcher Ella Been has managed to analyze 111 bone elements from this infant found in the Amud cave. Here, when studying the skeleton, the researchers discovered that the bone development of Amud 7 was going at a pace that today would seem dizzying given how advanced it is. And their physiology already showed very clear Neanderthal affinities despite their young age, confirming that the morphological differences between our species and theirs were established practically from birth or even in the womb. A Spanish touch. To understand the magnitude of this discovery, we have to travel to our country, and specifically to the Asturian cave of El Sidrón. Here in 2017 the magazine Science published a great work on a 7.7-year-old Neanderthal boy named Sidrón J1. What they found in that young hominid blew our minds, since, although in most of its bones it matured at a similar rate to ours, your brain was still growing at an age when a child’s brain sapiens It has already reached its final volume. But in addition, the maturation of his thoracic vertebrae was curiously delayed. Its meaning. The combination of these two discoveries makes us realize that Neanderthal development was not simply a rapid version of human development, but a completely different physiological pattern. In this way, while in its first months the body grew at a frenetic pace to guarantee survival, organs as energetically expensive as the brain required a prolonged growth period. It makes sense. If we look at the time where these children grew up, the truth is that this rapid growth makes sense. At that time, survival was the most important thing, and staying small and highly dependent on other people, the truth is, did not mark good survival within the theory of evolution. Although there is a nuance. A study published in 2012 suggested that, from the third or fourth month of life, the growth in height of Neanderthals could slow down. The reason is nothing more than weaning and the metabolic stress of growing up in Eurasia. hostile and cold, exposed to a large number of diseases and with a great energy need to maintain themselves. Images | freepik In Xataka | The surprising thing is not that we have sequenced the DNA of a Neanderthal from 11,000 years ago: it is what it has revealed
