Chimps mature with human ancestor
By Bruce Bower
Wild chimpanzees have taken a bite out of scientific assumptions about the growth rate of one of our most prominent Stone Age relatives.
New measurements of dental-growth rates of wild chimpanzees provide a more accurate benchmark for estimating comparably slow growth in Homo erectus teeth, say Adrienne Zihlman of the University of California, Santa Cruz and her colleagues.
“Our data suggest that wild chimpanzees and Homo erectus didn’t differ from each other as much as previously thought,” Zihlman says.