Some 49,000 years ago in what's now Spain, a Neanderthal boy died a few months shy of his eighth birthday. Now, scientists have examined his skeleton in detail—and they claim that the boy's growth largely mirrored that of today's human children.

The find, announced on Thursday in the journal Science, adds more evidence to the notion that long, slow development—thought to help to nurse a larger brain—isn't necessarily unique to Homo sapiens.

“We thought that our way of growing was really specific, very particular to our species,” says study leader Antonio Rosas, the chair of paleoanthropology at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid, Spain. “We realize now that this pattern of slow growth that allows us to