Neanderthal Breastfeeding Habits Revealed By Analysis Of Prehistoric Tooth (Balter, 2013)

• Manish Arora (an environmental health dentist) proposed it could be possible to ‘detect when a child was weaned from the amount of barium in its growing teeth’.^[1]

• Analysis of twenty-five donated baby teeth did show consistent patterns re. barium and weaning records.^[2]

‘Most of the teeth, a total of 22, revealed markedly higher barium levels right after birth; and in nine of 13 children who had first been breastfed and then given infant formula, the team could see a transition between the lower barium levels from breast milk and the higher barium levels of the formula. (The team could also distinguish children who went straight from breastfeeding to solid food without being given formula—their barium levels went down at the transition point.)’^[3]

• Louise Humphrey (anthropologist and tooth expert at London’s Natural History Museum) says ‘the early weaning of the Scladina child is “intriguing” because it is more than a year earlier than the nearly 30 months typical of modern human nonindustrial societies.’^[4]