THE age at which Neanderthals matured is proving tough to pin down. But a new study has backed what anthropologists suspected all along – that Neanderthals needed as long a childhood as we do because they also had large brains.
Last year a study of Neanderthal teeth suggested that they reached maturity around three years earlier than modern humans (Nature, vol 428, p 936).
Now Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg of Ohio State University in Newark reports that Neanderthal teeth grew at similar rates to ours, suggesting that they matured around the same time as us.
She compared rates of enamel formation in…
