Orangutans are the Primate Breastfeeding Championships: Shots
An orangutan mother and her 11 month old baby in Borneo. Orangutans feed the offspring during and after eight years.
Tim Laman / Science Advances
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An orangutan mother and her 11 month old baby in Borneo. Orangutans feed the offspring during and after eight years.
Tim Laman / Science AdvancesRegarding breastfeeding, orangutans are the champions.
Previous studies on orangutans in the wild have revealed that mothers feed their offspring up to seven years, longer than any other primate.
But a new study on the orangutan teeth even suggests that the estimate is low, reports a team Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
The study revealed that during periods when fruits and other foods became rare, young orangutans supplement their diets with breast milk. "And this model could last up to 8 or 9 years, which is very long," says Christine Austin, author of the paper and researcher in the Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health. Icahn School of Medicine at Mount. Sinai.
This late weaning is probably a survival strategy, says Tanya Smith, lead author of the study, who works at the Australian Research Center for Human Evolution at Griffith University. "Having a long period of nursing care can be a way for minors to learn the ins and outs of living in a difficult environment with limited and unpredictable food resources," she says.
Researchers have been uncertain about nursing behaviors in orang-for-wild animals because animals are very difficult to study. They live a solitary life in the peaks of tropical forests in Borneo and Sumatra.
So, Austin and a team of researchers wondered if they could get more detailed information by analyzing the teeth of deceased orangutans.
"Teeth are like an organic hard disk that records what's going on in your body every day," says Austin.
Teeth have growth rings as a tree, which provide a calendar of life of an animal. And the researchers showed that the barium levels in each ring indicate when an orangutu consumed milk.
The team managed to get teeth from four orangutans who died several decades ago. The teeth came from the museums.
Barium levels showed that during the first 12 to 18 months, young orangutans consumed only breast milk. Then they began to add other foods, mainly fruits.
But the animals seemed to resume nursing when other foods were not abundant. And this pattern of cyclical care continued until the orangutans approached puberty.
Eight years of nurses are much more than other primates get. The chimpanzee mothers will wean their young at about 5 years. Gorilla mothers stop taking care when their offspring are about 4.
And human babies do not go until after the age of 3, says Shara Bailey, A paleoanthropologist at the University of New York. "That's what makes weird humans," she said. "And this is certainly one of the reasons why our people have so much success that a species".
The transition of babies to other foods in early life allowed the first human females to produce more offspring than other species, according to Bailey.
But it is not clear when early weaning became common. It could have been nearly a million years ago, when one thinks that humans have learned to control the fire. Or it could have been 10,000 years ago when the agriculture came.
Scientists hope that by analyzing the teeth, it is possible to know how long our human ancestors have cared for. "The potential is there to watch now Neanderthals, Homo erectus Homo habilis [and] Australopithicenes," says Bailey. And perhaps, she says, "one can really have an idea of what is very strange that characterizes humans."
There is however a catch.
In order to analyze a tooth, researchers need to cut it. And museums are reluctant to damage some of their most valuable fossils.
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