Rare 30,000-year-old skeleton reveals when ancient humans went through puberty

According to archaeologists studying the skeletons of teenagers who died in Europe between 10,000 and 30,000 years ago, most Ice Age teenagers began puberty around the same time as modern humans. But physical maturity was delayed in some individuals, possibly due to their challenging and dangerous lifestyles.

An international team of researchers studied the skeletons of 13 teenagers found from seven archaeological sites in Italy, Russia and the Czech Republic (Czech Republic).

Ancient Youth Growth Surge

Infants are born with about twice as many bones as adults; during childhood, these bones grow and then fuse together when a person is between 18 and 25 years old.

Researchers looked at about a dozen skeletons from the last ice age, including one from Arene Candide in Italy (pictured here), to determine when adolescents reached key puberty milestones. (Photo: Mila Tomsich)

The researchers were able to determine when puberty was reached in 11 of the 13 ice age individuals. They found that these ancient teens had a growth spurt between the ages of 13 and 16 , similar to the ages of 12.5 to 14 for modern foraging groups.

Ice Age adolescents also reached adulthood between the ages of 16 and 21. This suggests that some ancient adolescents spent more time in adolescence than their counterparts in Western societies, who tend to reach adulthood between the ages of 16 and 18.

While it's not surprising that ancient Homo sapiens went through the same adolescent development as us, what is surprising is that they started puberty at the same age - 13.5 years - "suggesting that this age matches the potential 'genetic blueprint' for the onset of sexual maturity in humans," said study lead author Mary Lewis, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Reading in the UK.

'There's a common misconception that teens today are entering puberty much earlier,' says April Nowell, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. 'But what we're seeing is that teens today are following a pattern that has remained largely unchanged for thousands of years.'

For archaeologists, studying adolescents and puberty in the ancient past is key to understanding individual differences in puberty and the cultural significance that adolescence held in past societies, such as whether adolescents were treated differently by their communities, Nowell said.