Reconstruction of Romito 2, a 16-year-old teenager with a form of dwarfism who lived 11,000 years ago in southern Italy.
Drawing by: Olivier Graveleau.
The thing about this study from a creationist perspective is its two-fold refutation of basic creationist dogma.
Firstly, it is not so much that teenagers in the last Ice Age went through puberty at pretty much the same age as modern teenagers, despite an assumed improvement in the diet of modern people compared to that of a Pleistocene hunter-gatherer, but that there were actually human teenagers 15,000 years before creationist dogma says that there was an Earth.
Secondly, there is the fact that the remains of these teenagers are available for analysis, when the mythical global genocidal flood, so beloved of creationists, should have swept it all away.
But counter-factual creationism is never perturbed by scientific evidence because, as all creationists know, scientific evidence is either lies made up by evil scientists, or just plain wrong as 'proven' by the fact that creationist cult leaders say so and it doesn't conform with what a bunch of scientifically-illiterate Bronze Age pastoralists who thought the universe consisted of a small flat planet with a dome over it, made up in their origin myths.
Tell me about life for Homo sapiens in the European Pleistocene. Life for Homo sapiens during the Pleistocene was shaped by their need to adapt to a dynamic and often harsh environment, as they spread across Europe and other parts of the world. These early modern humans were highly resourceful, using their developing intelligence, social structures, and technology to thrive in the face of changing climates and competition from other hominins, such as Neanderthals.So, here again is some more science that refutes creationism, for creationists to ignore, misrepresent and/or lie about. It comes in the form of an open access paper in the Journal of Human Evolution by a team Co-led by University of Victoria (UVic) paleoanthropologist April Nowell.
Key Aspects of Homo sapiens Life in the Pleistocene
- Migration and Expansion:
- Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa around 300,000 years ago but only began migrating into Europe during the late Pleistocene, around 45,000 to 40,000 years ago. This period coincided with an interglacial phase that allowed humans to push into new territories.
- Their migration was likely driven by a combination of environmental pressures (like expanding deserts in Africa) and a search for food and new resources. Early modern humans spread rapidly across Europe, Asia, and eventually the Americas.
- Social Structures and Communities:
- Homo sapiens likely lived in small, mobile bands of hunter-gatherers, typically comprising 20–50 individuals. These groups were likely egalitarian, with tasks divided according to skill and need. Cooperation was key to survival, especially in hunting, gathering, and child-rearing.
- The ability to form complex social bonds and communicate effectively allowed them to organize large-scale activities, such as cooperative hunting, which contributed to their survival and dominance.
- Advanced Toolmaking and Innovation:
- One of the defining characteristics of Homo sapiens during the Pleistocene was their advanced tool-making abilities. In contrast to earlier hominins, they developed sophisticated technologies that allowed them to adapt to different environments.
- The Aurignacian culture (around 43,000 to 26,000 years ago) is associated with early Homo sapiens in Europe and introduced blade-based tools, bone tools, and even personal ornaments. Later, the Gravettian culture (around 31,000 to 22,000 years ago) developed highly specialized tools, including spears and nets for hunting smaller game.
- The Solutrean culture (around 21,000 to 17,000 years ago) introduced finely crafted stone tools, including leaf-shaped spear points. These were highly specialized and reflected a deep understanding of materials.
- Art, Culture, and Symbolism:
- One of the most remarkable aspects of Homo sapiens in the Pleistocene was the development of symbolic thought and artistic expression. These early humans left behind some of the world’s first known works of art, including cave paintings, carvings, and jewelry.
- Cave paintings, such as those found at Lascaux, Chauvet, and Altamira, feature depictions of animals, abstract symbols, and possibly even early human figures. These suggest that Homo sapiens had a rich cultural and spiritual life, with symbolic thought playing a central role.
- Early humans also created personal ornaments, such as beads made from shells, bones, and teeth. These were likely used for decoration and possibly to signify status or identity within groups.
- Hunting and Diet:
- Homo sapiens were highly adaptable hunter-gatherers, able to exploit a wide range of environments and food sources. In Europe, they hunted large animals like mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, bison, and reindeer. Evidence suggests that they employed sophisticated hunting strategies, often working in groups to trap or ambush their prey.
- In addition to big game, Homo sapiens also consumed smaller animals, fish, and a variety of plant resources, depending on the season and location. Their ability to exploit different food sources gave them a significant survival advantage over more specialized species like Neanderthals.
- Shelter and Clothing:
- Pleistocene Homo sapiens lived in a variety of shelters, including caves, rock shelters, and temporary huts or shelters made from animal hides, wood, and bones. Caves, such as those in southern France and northern Spain, provided natural protection from the elements and were often used for extended periods.
- Clothing made from animal skins was essential for survival in the cold European Pleistocene climate. Evidence suggests that Homo sapiens developed the technology to stitch and sew garments, a skill that would have been crucial for staying warm in the harsh environments of glacial Europe.
- Interaction with Neanderthals:
- As Homo sapiens spread into Europe, they encountered Neanderthals, who had been living there for hundreds of thousands of years. Genetic evidence suggests that there was some degree of interbreeding between the two species, as modern non-African humans carry a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA.
- While the exact nature of interactions between the two species remains unclear, it’s likely that competition for resources and territory played a role in the eventual extinction of Neanderthals. However, Homo sapiens may have also learned survival strategies from Neanderthals, such as hunting techniques and tool use.
- Spirituality and Burial Practices:
- Late Pleistocene Homo sapiens exhibited behaviors that suggest a belief in the afterlife or a spiritual realm. Burials from this period often contain grave goods, such as tools, ornaments, and animal bones, which indicate that early humans may have believed in life after death.
- One of the most famous examples is the Gravettian burial of a man and two children at the Sungir site in Russia, where the individuals were buried with beads, ivory spears, and other objects. Such practices suggest that early Homo sapiens had developed complex rituals and possibly religious beliefs.
Adaptation to Climate and Environmental Challenges
Homo sapiens faced immense environmental challenges during the Pleistocene, especially the fluctuating climate that alternated between ice ages and warmer interglacial periods. During colder periods, large parts of Europe were covered in glaciers or tundra, and humans had to adapt to these cold environments. This likely spurred innovations in clothing, shelter construction, and food storage techniques.
Their adaptability allowed them to survive and thrive where other species, like Neanderthals, eventually declined. The ability of Homo sapiens to create and adapt new technologies, form complex social groups, and develop symbolic culture likely played a significant role in their success during this period.
In summary, Homo sapiens during the Pleistocene were highly adaptable and innovative, capable of surviving in harsh and changing environments. Their advanced social structures, tool use, art, and symbolic behavior distinguished them from earlier hominins and paved the way for the development of modern human cultures.
Briefly, the team used known anatomical markers such as the mineralization of the canine teeth and the development of the ends of bones where the epiphyseal or growth plate, becomes fully mineralised and fuses the end of the bone to its shaft, which are known to be associated with an adolescent growth spurt which is in turn associated with puberty, to estimate how far into puberty the person had progressed at death. The remains were all placed in the late Pleistocene by 14C dating, either of the bones themselves or of associated surroundings.
For a description of how 14C dating works and how creationists lie to their dupes about it, see How Creationists Lie To Us - Carbon Dating Hoax
The team's research is described in a news release from the University of Victoria, Canada:
Research reveals reality of Ice Age teen puberty
Landmark new research shows Ice Age teens from 25,000 years ago went through similar puberty stages as modern-day adolescents. In a study published today in the Journal of Human Evolution of the timing of puberty in Pleistocene teens, researchers are addressing a knowledge gap about how early humans grew up.
Found in the bones of 13 ancient humans between 10 and 20 years old is evidence of puberty stages. Co-led by University of Victoria (UVic) paleoanthropologist April Nowell, researchers found specific markers in the bones that allowed them to assess the progress of adolescence.
University of Victoria paleoanthropologist April Nowell says specific markers in the bones of unearthed from the Pleistocene era allows researchers to assess the progression of adolescence. These findings can humanize teens in a way studying tools cannot.Credit: UVic Photo Services.The technique was developed by lead author Mary Lewis from the University of Reading. Lewis’s technique evaluates the mineralization of the canines and maturation of the bones of the hand, elbow, wrist, neck and pelvis to identify the stage of puberty reached by the individual at their time of death.By analyzing specific areas of the skeleton, we inferred things like menstruation and someone’s voice breaking.
April Nowell, senior author.
Department of Anthropology
University of Victoria
Victoria, BC, Canada.
Life during prehistory was believed to be as Thomas Hobbes described: “nasty, brutish and short.” However, this new study shows these teens were actually quite healthy. Most individuals in the study sample entered puberty by 13.5, reaching full adulthood between 17 and 22 years old. This indicates these Ice Age adolescents started puberty at a similar time to teens in modern, wealthy countries.This is the first time my puberty stage estimation method has been applied to Paleolithic fossils and it is also the oldest application of another method—peptide analysis—for biological sex estimation.
Mary E. Lewis, first author.
Department of Archaeology
University of Reading
Reading, UK.
It can sometimes be difficult for us to connect with the remote past, but we all went through puberty even if we experienced it differently. Our research helps to humanize these teens in a way that simply studying stone tools cannot.
April Nowell.
One of the 13 skeletons examined was “Romito 2,” an adolescent estimated to be male and the earliest known individual with a form of dwarfism. This new research on puberty assessment provides further information about Romito 2’s likely physical appearance and his social role.
Dr. Mary Lewis from the University of Reading (UK) inspects the skeletal remains of Romito 2 found in southern Italy.
Since he was mid-way through puberty, his voice would be deeper much like an adult male and he would have been able to father children; however, he may still have appeared quite youthful with fine facial hair. Due to his short height, his appearance would have been closer to that of a child, which may have had implications for how he was perceived by his community.
Researchers from six institutions collaborated internationally to develop this body of knowledge: UVic (Canada), University of Reading and University of Liverpool (UK), Museum of Prehistoric Anthropology of Monaco (Monaco), University of Cagliari (Italy) and University of Siena (Italy). The collaboration continues with research into the lives of Ice Age teenagers and their social roles.The specific information about the physical appearance and developmental stage of these Ice Age adolescents derived from our puberty study provides a new lens through which to interpret their burials and treatment in death.
Jennifer C. French
Department of Archaeology Classics and Egyptology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK.
As though any more evidence were needed, it is now clear that not only were there fully-formed, anatomically modern Homo sapiens living in Europe at least 15,000 years before creationists tell their credulous dupe Earth was magicked up out of nothing by an invisible magic man made of nothing, but that they were pretty much like us in all anatomical and physiological respects.HighlightsAbstract
- Provides the first direct evidence for puberty in Upper Paleolithic adolescents.
- Puberty began by 13.5 years in the Mid-Late Upper Paleolithic.
- Puberty data enrich archaeological interpretations of individual adolescents.
- This is the oldest application of peptide analysis for biological sex estimation.
Childhood and adolescence are two life-history stages that are either unique to humans, or significantly expanded in the human life course relative to other primates. While recent studies have deepened our knowledge of childhood in the Upper Paleolithic, adolescence in this period remains understudied. Here, we use bioarchaeological maturational markers to estimate puberty status of 13 Upper Paleolithic adolescents from sites in Russia, Czechia, and Italy to 1) evaluate the feasibility of the application of bioarchaeological puberty assessment methods to Upper Paleolithic (Homo sapiens) skeletal individuals, 2) estimate the timing and tempo of puberty in Upper Paleolithic adolescents compared to other archaeological populations analyzed using the same method, and 3) characterize adolescence in the Upper Paleolithic by contextualizing the results of this puberty assessment with data on individual and population-level health, morbidity and burial practices. Our results revealed that while puberty had begun by 13.5 years of age for the majority of individuals, there was a lot of variability, with the adolescents from Arene Candide (AC1 and AC16), both aged around 16 years when they died, taking several years longer to progress through puberty than their peers. Assessing the age of menarche was challenging due to the paucity of female adolescents, but based on the available evidence, it appears to have occurred between 16 and 17 years of age. For some, full adulthood had been achieved by 17–22 years, similar to the patterns seen in modern wealthy countries and in advance of historic populations living in urbanized environments. The bioarchaeological analysis of puberty among Upper Paleolithic adolescents has important implications for the study of the emergence of adolescence within human-life histories, as well as for understanding the developmental plasticity of sexual maturation across past and present human populations.
1. Introduction
Adolescence is a dynamic life-history stage, during which physical and cognitive development is influenced by individual prenatal and childhood experiences, which can in turn, dictate adult health outcomes (Dorn et al., 2019; Lewis, 2022). Puberty describes both the initial cascade of hormones from the brain, which kick-starts the process of sexual maturation (or fertility), and a longer-term series of physiological changes including the adolescent growth spurt, the development of musculature in males and breasts in females, the appearance of pubic hair, and psychological changes (Goldman, 1981; Bogin et al., 2018). It is the changes of puberty that signal the start and the end of adolescence as a life stage.
Adolescence has recently emerged as a distinct area of enquiry within the field of bioarchaeology. A focus on adolescents in the past informs us not only on the experience of those individuals who were undergoing the physiological transition to adulthood but also on the wider health and well-being of the populations to which they belonged (Avery et al., 2021; Avery and Lewis, 2022.1; French and Nowell, 2022.2). Much of the recent research into the bioarchaeology of adolescence has been driven by the development of a method by Shapland and Lewis (2013, 2014; Lewis et al., 2016) to estimate the timing of puberty as a proxy for tracing the adolescent growth spurt, using specific dental and skeletal markers. Adapted from clinical observations, this method evaluates the mineralization of the canine, and maturation of the bones of the hand (metacarpals and phalanges), elbow (distal humerus), wrist (distal radius, hamate), neck (cervical vertebrae), and pelvis (ilium), to estimate the stage of puberty reached by the individual at their time of death. This knowledge can then be used to infer the external physical appearance of that individual, an appearance that changes with each stage of sexual maturation.
This ‘puberty’ method has been used to explore the timing and tempo (pace) of puberty across a range of archaeological contexts, both historic (medieval England: Lewis et al., 2016; DeWitte and Lewis, 2020; Roman England: Arthur et al., 2016.1; early 20th century Portugal: Henderson and Padez, 2017; medieval Spain: Doe et al., 2019.1 2022.3; post-medieval Netherlands: Blom et al., 2020.1; Roman Italy and Gaul: Avery et al., 2023; New Kingdom Egypt: Dabbs, 2023.1) and prehistoric (Bronze Age Spain: Doe et al., 2019.1 pre-Roman Italy: Bareggi et al., 2022.4) but has yet to be applied to pre-Holocene populations. Here, we present the first direct evidence for the timing of sexual maturation in Pleistocene adolescents by estimating puberty stage in a skeletal sample dated to the European Upper Paleolithic (∼54–12 ka; Slimak et al., 2022.5).
The European Upper Paleolithic is an ideal case study for an investigation of puberty in the Pleistocene. European Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers were members of our species, Homo sapiens, permitting the application of osteological methods developed on later historical skeletal populations. Current consensus places the emergence of adolescence as a distinct life-history stage in the Middle-Late Pleistocene, as part of the general shift toward the ‘slow’ life history typical of H. sapiens ( Robson and Wood, 2008). Hence, the existence of this life stage in the Upper Paleolithic is not in contention, and instead, attention can be directed toward understanding the timing and tempo of the developmental changes of puberty that characterize this life-history stage. For example, when considering the intimate link between physical and psychological development during adolescence, Gluckman and Hanson (2006) had suggested that puberty occurred earlier in mobile Paleolithic hunter-gatherer societies than in sedentary Neolithic farming societies. The developmental delay of the latter, they argued, matched the more ‘complex’ Neolithic social environment, allowing young people longer to reach the level of psychosocial maturity necessary to function as an adult in a more socially differentiated society. Estimates of puberty status directly applied to the skeletal remains of Upper Paleolithic adolescents allow us to examine the possible links between adolescent development and the wider social environment earlier in our evolution.
The practice of formal burial during the Upper Paleolithic has resulted in a comparatively large and well-preserved (at least in Pleistocene terms) skeletal sample, information on which is increasingly supplemented by the extraction of ancient DNA (aDNA). Adolescence is often a time when individuals are prepared for their future economic and family roles and responsibilities (which vary depending on gender). In recognition of having reached a new life stage, adolescents may be treated differently, in life and death, from both younger children and adults (Schlegel and Barry, 1991; Nowell and French, 2020.2; French and Nowell, 2022.2). The rich archaeological record of the period provides a broader contextual framework for interpreting the findings of the puberty-stage assessment, allowing for the exploration of both the biological and sociocultural facets of Upper Paleolithic adolescence.
The aims of this research are as follows: 1) to assess the feasibility of the application of bioarchaeological puberty assessment methods to Upper Paleolithic (H. sapiens) skeletal individuals, 2) to estimate the timing and tempo of puberty in Upper Paleolithic adolescents compared with other archaeological populations analyzed using the same method, and 3) to characterize adolescence in the Upper Paleolithic, contextualizing the results of this puberty assessment with data on health, morbidity, and burial practices.Lewis, Mary E.; French, Jennifer C.; Rossoni-Notter, Elena; Notter, Olivier; Moussous, Abdelkader; Sparacello, Vitale; Boschin, Francesco; Ricci, Stefano; Nowell, April
An assessment of puberty status in adolescents from the European Upper Paleolithic
Journal of Human Evolution (2024) 103577; DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2024.10357.
Copyright: © 2024 The authors.
Published by Elsevier Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
It is also clear, as though more evidence were needed, that there never was a global genocidal flood as described in creationists favourite book of Bronze Age origin myths, because such a flood would have left no trace of these earlier cultures, or at best would have buried it under several feet thick layers of silt containing the fossilised bodies of all the plants and animals killed in the flood. Not only is there no such layer covering these sites in Europe, there is no such layer to be found anywhere on Earth.
No wonder the cult leaders put so much effort into fooling their dupes that all the geochronology methods are flawed and make 10,000 years or less look like 25,000 years, 100,000 years, or tens or hundreds of millions of years, even billions of years - or whatever order of magnitude they need their dupes to be misled about.
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