Baby Neanderthal Breast-Fed for 7 Months

A baby Neanderthal who lived in what is now Belgium about 100,000 years ago started eating solid food at 7 months old, revealing a new aspect of the evolution of breast-feeding.

The precision of this estimate is courtesy a new technique that uses elements in teeth to determine when breast-feeding started and stopped. Though researchers can't be sure the young Neanderthal's pattern was typical of its kind, such a breast-feeding pattern is not unlike that seen in many modern humans...

Until now, however, no one had an effective way of looking at bones and reconstructing breast-feeding history. Past attempts had relied on moms' memories of when they started supplementing breast milk with solid food and when they weaned their babies...

He and his colleagues had an advantage: A large study of pregnant women in Monterey County, Calif., that started when the women were only 20 weeks along in their pregnancies and followed them for years. At seven years and onward, the mothers were asked to donate a baby tooth their child had lost. Arora and his colleagues analyzed the teeth for biomarkers that matched changes in the child's breast-feeding status.

“Infinitely more scientific than the joke photos in post #17.”

Well, it was still very funny that “F” was included in that gallery.

I am not, obviously, an anthropologist. I had one course in college (Man in the Pleistocene) and continue to read popular literature, but am in no way competent to understand what is wrong with the arguments advanced by Vendramini. I mean, it looks plausible to me.

dsc: "I am not, obviously, an anthropologist.
I had one course in college (Man in the Pleistocene) and continue to read popular literature, but am in no way competent to understand what is wrong with the arguments advanced by Vendramini.
I mean, it looks plausible to me."

Nor am I an expert, but those Vendramini images are not even remotely "plausible", and here's why:

First and most obvious there's no way that, after hundreds of thousands of years living up north, Neanderthals were still black.
Vendramini's inhuman facial expressions are obviously intended to frighten more than enlighten.
Recent DNA analysis shows some levels of interbreeding between humans & Neanderthals -- which tells us they cannot possibly have been so very different from ourselves.
Further, it suggests that the side which captured women and kept their babies was not the Neanderthals.
Finally, photos of more serious scientific efforts to reconstruct Neanderthals' appearance, show them far more sympathetically and realistically.

So those Vendranamini images seem obvious anti-Neanderthal propaganda, doubtless intended to suggest there is no way interbreeding happened, or if it did, that the resulting hybrids were decidedly in-human.

Neither supposition seems realistic to me.

Some comparisons of Vendramini versus other representations of Neanderthals vs early humans:

Chuckmorse: "The Monkey Trial - Evolutionary Politics in the post-Traditional Age by Chuck Morse"

If you wish to argue that today's culture has sunk ever deeper these past, oh say, 150 years, and that evolution theory has been misused to justify countless horrors, then I'm all with you -- tell it like it is.

But if you somehow suggest that this makes the scientific theory of evolution invalid, I'd call that a non-sequitur.
It would be like saying that since the Atom bomb killed so many people, therefore it's science is flawed.

Bottom line: the scientific evolution hypothesis has been confirmed often enough to be considered a valid theory, and some of its processes (descent with modifications, natural selection) have been observed, making them facts.

Allegations of "flaws" notwithstanding, there is no confirmed evidence to validly falsify the theory.

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