Neanderthal toddlers grew faster than their modern human counterparts, likely as an adaptation to living in a cold, harsh environment, new research suggests.
The discovery, which was made using the bones of a young Neanderthal discovered in Amud Cave in northern Israel in the 1990s, suggests that Neanderthals and modern humans (Homo sapiens) followed different evolutionary paths after they split from a common ancestor around 600,000 years ago, the researchers reported April 15 in the journal Current Biology.
