Publication Date:
2013-05-24
Description:
Early-life dietary transitions reflect fundamental aspects of primate evolution and are important determinants of health in contemporary human populations. Weaning is critical to developmental and reproductive rates; early weaning can have detrimental health effects but enables shorter inter-birth intervals, which influences population growth. Uncovering early-life dietary history in fossils is hampered by the absence of prospectively validated biomarkers that are not modified during fossilization. Here we show that large dietary shifts in early life manifest as compositional variations in dental tissues. Teeth from human children and captive macaques, with prospectively recorded diet histories, demonstrate that barium (Ba) distributions accurately reflect dietary transitions from the introduction of mother's milk through the weaning process. We also document dietary transitions in a Middle Palaeolithic juvenile Neanderthal, which shows a pattern of exclusive breastfeeding for seven months, followed by seven months of supplementation. After this point, Ba levels in enamel returned to baseline prenatal levels, indicating an abrupt cessation of breastfeeding at 1.2 years of age. Integration of Ba spatial distributions and histological mapping of tooth formation enables novel studies of the evolution of human life history, dietary ontogeny in wild primates, and human health investigations through accurate reconstructions of breastfeeding history.〈br /〉〈br /〉〈a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3725337/" target="_blank"〉〈img src="https://static.pubmed.gov/portal/portal3rc.fcgi/4089621/img/3977009" border="0"〉〈/a〉 〈a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3725337/" target="_blank"〉This paper as free author manuscript - peer-reviewed and accepted for publication〈/a〉〈br /〉〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Austin, Christine -- Smith, Tanya M -- Bradman, Asa -- Hinde, Katie -- Joannes-Boyau, Renaud -- Bishop, David -- Hare, Dominic J -- Doble, Philip -- Eskenazi, Brenda -- Arora, Manish -- 4R00ES019597-03/ES/NIEHS NIH HHS/ -- P01 ES009605/ES/NIEHS NIH HHS/ -- R00 ES019597/ES/NIEHS NIH HHS/ -- England -- Nature. 2013 Jun 13;498(7453):216-9. doi: 10.1038/nature12169. Epub 2013 May 22.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Preventive Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York 10029, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23698370" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Adult
;
Animals
;
Barium/*analysis
;
Breast Feeding/history
;
Calcium/analysis
;
Child, Preschool
;
*Diet/veterinary
;
Female
;
*Fossils
;
History, Ancient
;
Humans
;
Infant
;
Macaca/*physiology
;
Neanderthals/*physiology
;
Reproducibility of Results
;
Tooth/*chemistry
;
*Weaning
Print ISSN:
0028-0836
Electronic ISSN:
1476-4687
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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