Scientists Have Discovered One Key Habit That We Humans Share With Neanderthals

You might think that Neanderthals were very different from us modern-day humans. It’s true that lots about them is strange to us – from their biology to behaviors. That doesn’t mean we have nothing in common, and one study from 2020 shows a rather unexpected similarity. Yep, you might be surprised when you find out just what we share.

Quite a lot of things we know about Neanderthals come from DNA research. This has given us insight into how they looked and the likely structure of their society. There are still questions, though. Why, for instance, did Neanderthals go extinct while humans thrived? Well, mysteries like this have led scientists to try and explore just what makes us different to Neanderthals.

One of the enduring questions facing those who study human evolution is just how much of a resemblance can be found between ancient Homo sapiens and their Neanderthal cousins. A particularly difficult area of investigation is the early life of the latter – including their metabolism and how they grow. Does it have any similarity to human development?

The study we mentioned earlier was headed by Dr. Alessia Nava of both the Skeletal Biology Research Centre at the U.K.’s University of Kent and the Department of Maxillo-Facial Sciences in Rome’s Sapienza University. Other researchers came from different Italian and German institutions, so it was an international team. The work, meanwhile, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Their focus was a little corner of northeastern Italy, where archeologists had uncovered several fossilized teeth. The most recent of these was 50,000 years old, while the oldest is from 70,000 years ago. They were Neanderthal teeth and the chemicals and isotopes they contained could provide fascinating answers to how these ancient people lived.