Cool news! So every weekday morning during the academic year, Harvard e-mails a briefing called the Harvard Gazette to all students and faculty at the College. The daily Harvard Gazette always appears in the same format, with three featured articles appearing under 'Today's Headlines'.
Unrelated, but I almost always receive this e-mail at 7:01 in the morning, never earlier, but sometimes a couple of minutes later.
Anyhow, the very first feature under 'Today's Headlines' in the issue dated 11/16/20 is titled Teeth Marks!
"An examination of teeth from 11 Neanderthal and early human fossils shows that modern humans are slower than our ancestors to reach full maturity. The finding suggests that our slow development and long childhood are recent and unique to our own species, and may have given early humans an evolutionary advantage over Neanderthals."
Apparently, a longer childhood is a recent evolutionary development, as indicated by the fact that a young Neanderthal's rate of teeth growth and development was significantly faster than of the closest-to-modern humans that lived almost one hundred thousand years ago.
Ultimately, this (and I'm sure a number of other related indicators including proportional cranial size relative to the body) led to an evolutionary advantage of our human ancestors over Neanderthals. From my understanding, longer childhoods essentially prolong a number of crucial behavioral and cognitive developmental periods.
Interesting!
Also ... my post title = the subject of the Gazette e-mail -- strange, I know! To my knowledge, Neanderthal teeth, anemia risk, and China's history are largely unrelated.
Here's the full link to the article!
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/11/neanderthal-teeth/
Eric
I actually remember opening this e-mail that day (I usually delete them) just because the subject read Neanderthal Teeth and thought about how much you would love this lol. Seeya back on campus
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