Anthropologists studied the teeth composition of two Neanderthal babies and uncovered many important details of their difficult life, including withstanding harsh winters and lead poisoning.
An international team of anthropologists analyzed teeth that belonged to Neanderthal children who lived in France about 250,000 years ago. The work revealed the extremely challenging conditions in which Neanderthal babies grew up, including harsh climatic tests and lead poisoning. Scientists write about this in an article published in the journal Science Advances.
It is believed that, unlike our direct ancestors, the Neanderthals were "native Europeans" and adapted well to life in the harsh conditions that existed on the continent hundreds of thousands of years ago, during the icing period. The picture of the trials and tribulations that they had to overcome is revealed in a new work by Tanya Smith of the Australian Griffith University and her colleagues.
The remains of two Neanderthal children (Payre 6 and Payre 336) were found at the Payre site in the Rhône in southeastern France. For comparison, the scientists used teeth found in the same site, but belonging to an ordinary human child who lived here much later, about 5,000 years ago.
Teeth are continuously grinded and renewed with new tissue, therefore, like in the rings of trees, they store valuable information about the conditions in which they grew. From this point of view, children's teeth are especially interesting: they grow new ones continuously, and scientists, carefully evaporating them layer by layer using a laser, were able to trace all the details of the composition of the tissue step by step.
Such work showed that one of the studied Neanderthal children was born in the spring, which is not at all surprising: most large mammals acquire offspring in the spring in order to have enough time to feed and grow on rich summer food. At the same time, both children continued to drink breast milk for up to two and a half years (this period was also typical for feeding in people in pre-industrial communities).
The ratio of the content of various oxygen isotopes in the teeth suggests that these babies experienced much more severe climatic changes than the child who lived here several hundred thousand years later - with alternating sharply expressed dry frosts and heat, strong temperature extremes. Their "winter" enamel is rather weak, and scientists are sure that during these periods the children of the Neanderthals were sick and starved especially often, losing weight and greatly weakening. Neanderthal mothers had no less care with them than modern ones - with modern children.
Layer by layer, the composition of the teeth revealed the details of the life of the Neanderthal babies.
Promotional video:
In addition, their teeth retained traces of at least two contact with lead - the oldest such evidence known to science today. Perhaps these Neanderthals drank water containing lead, or inhaled smoke from the fire, where fragments of it fell. This could well have happened: 25 kilometers from their location there are old lead mines, now not used, but once quite rich in this toxic metal.
Sergey Vasiliev