Key Takeaways About Neanderthal Babies

• From what science can tell based on infant remains, Neanderthal babies grew much faster and were larger than modern human babies.
• Neanderthal baby growth patterns were different from human growth patterns, but human baby growth patterns eventually caught up.
• Researchers believe that these findings may reflect an adaptation to colder climates.

Researchers in Israel have been studying how Neanderthal babies grew during their earliest months of life and how they changed over time by looking at a rare preserved Neanderthal baby skeleton that tells the story of how life started, even when it ended far too young.

A recent study published in Current Biology documented the remains of a skeleton called Amud 7, an infant Neanderthal experts found in the Amud Cave in northern Israel. The dental remains indicate that it was an infant, approximately 6 months of age. The baby, which is about 55,000 years old, was well preserved because it had been placed in a burial within a cave.

According to lead study author Ella Been, a lecturer in the Department of Anatomy and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University, these remains, and the remains of two other infant Neanderthals found at other sites, show us that while Neanderthal babies were similar to modern humans, they grew much quicker and were significantly larger than a human baby. Even though the infant was probably about 6 months old, its body would have been about the size of a human 1-year-old with a head that was slightly larger.

“From birth to 5 to 7 years of life, Neanderthal babies grew very fast,” Been said to Discover. She adds that the size of their cranial and somatic growth — the growth of their body in general — suggests that Neanderthals seemed to grow faster as babies and in childhood.

Neanderthal Babies Were Bigger

This begs the question of whether the pregnancy of a Neanderthal mother was longer and how big the babies were at birth. Erella Hovers, study author and a professor of prehistoric archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology in Israel, told Discover that she thinks the babies were slightly bigger and the gestational period for a mother was probably about the same, though this is more speculation and is difficult to know for sure.

There is also some evidence to show that the Neanderthal women's pelvic structure was slightly wider, which could indicate a larger infant size at birth and a longer gestation period, but many scientists dispute these findings, according to a study in the Journal of Human Evolution.

Read More: From DNA to the Fossil Record, Here's Why We Have a Good Idea of What Neanderthals Looked Like

Neanderthal Babies Eventually Slow Down Their Growth

Been says that by around age 8, the growth of the entire body slows down, but the cranial volume, or the size of the head, continues to be larger. They’re not tall, but they remain robust. Been and her team have looked at two other Neanderthal specimens and found similar results, which show a very large body for the dental age of the teeth.

“This is a growth pattern that we see in Neanderthal babies, but at some point, Homo sapiens babies catch up,” Hovers said to Discover. She added that dental, brain, and body size plateaus, and they come out at about the same size.

Animals that live in colder climates tend to be bigger and more robust because it helps them to regulate their body temperature. While the Neanderthals that lived in the Levant, a region on the Mediterranean shores of the Middle East, did not live in a colder climate, their forefathers that moved into the Levant might have come from a colder climate and were adapted to it.

Normally, archaeologists don’t find skeletons that are as intact as Amud 7; they find bits and pieces, which would make it more difficult to understand growth patterns, Hovers said. This tells us that in the case of Neanderthals, unless you found the specimen connected, the teeth and the body of a baby would give you different ages; you would not even know that they belong to the same individual.

“You could think that these were two individuals, but they might actually be the same one,” Hovers said to Discover.

Article Sources

Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:

• This article references information from a study published in Current Biology: Rapid growth in a Neandertal infant from Amud Cave in Israel
• This article references information from a study published in theJournal of Human Evolution:New insights into the Neanderthal pelvis morphology based on a partial os coxae from El Sidrón (Asturias, Spain)
• This article references information from a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal: Head circumference values among Inuit children in Nunavut, Canada: a retrospective cohort study