![]() ![]() ![]() "What's interesting, however, is that there can be conflict surrounding this where the juveniles are trying to get as much as possible from the mother and the mother is actually covering up her nipples and moving around. "We're now working on a project that's focused on body size and growth, but we're also planning future studies that will look at their energetic condition so we can understand what they're trying to get from the mother by continuing to nurse," she said. While questions of why juvenile chimps continue to nurse - in some cases for months - have yet to be answered, Machanda said those questions will likely be the subject of future studies. "They were showing adult-like feeding patterns while continuing to suckle, which was unexpected." Where earlier studies suggested that juvenile primates were weaned shortly after their first molar erupts, their study showed that, in addition to eating more solid food, chimps continued to "suckle as much, if not more, than they had before," Smith said. What the images revealed, Smith and Machanda said, came as a surprise. The detailed photos, some of which captured the same individuals over months, allowed researchers to track precisely when molars erupted, and to correlate that information with chimp's behavior more closely than ever before. Researchers studying the Kanyawara chimpanzee community in Kibale National Park in Uganda teamed up with wildlife photographers who snapped photos of juvenile chimp's teeth whenever they opened their mouths. To solve those problems, Smith, Wrangham and Machanda developed a unique method for studying juvenile chimps in the wild. To properly understand those developmental landmarks, remains must be properly identified and aged, a notoriously difficult process for primates in dense tropical forests. Researchers studying skeletal remains of wild primates face a similar challenge. That early development means the milestones researchers rely on as proxies for understanding early human species likely occur earlier than they normally would. Studies have shown that captive chimps grow dramatically faster - often reaching adult size by age 10 or 11, compared to 13 to 15 for wild chimps. Both, however, also came with challenges for researchers. Most prior studies of tooth development in juvenile chimps relied on two methods of collecting data - observing captive animals or studying skeletal remains of wild primates. Getting an inside view of chimpanzee childhood, however, is no easy task. ![]() That suggests we should be more cautious if we want to infer what juvenile hominins were like." "A number of researchers have tried to extrapolate that relationship to the human fossil record, but it now appears that our closest living relative doesn't fit that pattern. ![]() "When these earlier studies were published about 20 years ago, they found a very tight relationship between the eruption of the first molar and certain developmental milestones, particularly weaning," Smith explained. Their study is described in a January 28 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using a first-of-its-kind method, a team of researchers led by professors Tanya Smith and Richard Wrangham and Postdoctoral Fellow Zarin Machanda of Harvard's Department of Human Evolutionary Biology used high-resolution digital photographs of chimps in the wild to show that after the eruption of their first molar tooth, many juvenile chimps continue to nurse as much, if not more, than they had in the past. ![]()
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