Neanderthals were enormous compared to modern humans

Neanderthal babies may have been physically dwarfed Homo sapiens counterparts, according to a new study that examined the infant skeleton of one of our ancient hominin relatives.

“We can’t say how advanced the Neanderthal babies were in their behavior,” he says Ella Been at Ono Academic College in Israel. “We don’t know if they started walking at a different time than modern human babies.” But he says they were big and “not necessarily chubby.”

Been and her colleagues performed a detailed anatomical analysis of a nearly complete skeleton of a Neanderthal child who lived in what is now Israel sometime between 51,000 and 56,000 years ago.

The infants, known as Amud 7, were discovered in a cave 4 kilometers off the west coast of the Sea of ​​Galilee in Israel in 1992. Their gender cannot be determined. Amud 7 is one of the few young Neanderthals ever recorded.

Neanderthals were the dominant hominin species throughout Eurasia for several hundred thousand years, until climate change and competition with modern humans saw their extinction around 40,000 years ago.

Based on the baby’s teething stage and microscopic scans of the internal structure of the teeth, Amud 7 was likely about 6 months old when they died, Been says.

But in terms of bone length and brain development, Amud 7 is more comparable to a modern human between 12 and 14 months of age. In other words, the child appears to have a young dental age and a much older skeletal age.

Been says that when the researchers compared these findings from Amud 7 with those from two other Neanderthal children, a two-year-old named Dederiyeh 1 from Syria and a three-year-old found at Roc de Marsal in France, they saw the same trend.

“Seeing the same pattern in three different Neanderthal children shows that it’s not random,” says Been.

We are trying to match the developmental markers of Amud 7 and other Neanderthal juveniles to the expected growth timeline H. sapiens is problematic, he says.

Instead, it is likely that Neanderthal infants a H. sapiens The children had significantly different growth rates, which means higher energy demands in young Neanderthals, he says. By about age 7, however, the growth differences seem to disappear, and children of both species follow a similar trajectory, Been says.

If she had to pick the most likely age of Amud 7, Been says it would be based on the teeth, not the skeleton.

“I think Amud 7 is older than 6 months,” he says. “In the first years of life, from birth to early childhood, Neanderthals grew faster than modern humans.”

This was probably an adaptation to the harsh environments they lived in, Been says, because smaller bodies tend to lose heat faster than larger ones.

Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London, says Amud 7 fills an important gap in the story of how Neanderthals evolved.

“When scientists put all the evidence together, they identify three distinct growth stages in young Neanderthals,” he says. The teeth of newborn Neanderthals generally developed in sync with the rest of their bodies. Then, in infants and toddlers like Amud 7, there was a surge in body and brain growth compared to slower tooth development. “However, in older children, tooth and body development came back into sync, while brain growth continued at a rapid pace,” he says.

As adults, Neanderthals were similar in size to H. sapienssays Been – “although they were on the shorter side”.

topics:

• Neanderthals/
• ancient people