Neanderthal babies have always been hard to study, mostly because their remains are so rare. That scarcity has left one of the oldest arguments in human origins unsettled: were Neanderthals following a fundamentally different developmental path from the start, or did the gap between them and modern humans open later? A set of fragile bones and milk teeth from Sesselfelsgrotte cave in Lower Bavaria now pushes that debate in a clearer direction. Using high-resolution micro-CT scans, an international team examined bone fragments from a Neanderthal fetus and two milk teeth from two young children who lived roughly 75,000 to 50,000 years ago. What they found suggests that, at least late in pregnancy, Neanderthals were developing in ways that looked remarkably familiar. “Our results indicate that both human forms progressed through strikingly similar growth processes, at least during the later stages of pregnancy,” said Prof. Dr. Thorsten Uthmeier, Chair of Prehistoric Archaeology at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Prof. Dr. Thorsten Uthmeier, Chair of Prehistoric Archaeology at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. (CREDIT: Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) The work adds weight to a broader …