Monkey teeth help reveal Neanderthal weaning
Friday, May 24, 2013 - 10:30
in Paleontology & Archaeology
Most modern human mothers wean their babies much earlier than our closest primate relatives. But what about our extinct relatives, the Neanderthals? A team of U.S. and Australian researchers reports that they can now use fossil teeth to calculate when a Neanderthal baby was weaned. The new technique is based in part on knowledge gained from studies of teeth from human infants and from monkeys.