Puberty Hasn't Changed Since the Ice Age | Hacker News Reader

Puberty Hasn't Changed Since the Ice Age

nautil.us

21 pointsdnetesn7 comments

I really don't like these articles that don't necessarily link to (or even have the same title as) the actual research.

I'd be curious if anybody is collecting distribution of the ages of puberty across country and across time. I don't think you can simply look at mean because there can be outliers in both directions.

For what it's worth, the nautilus articles normally link to the research and it's generally one of the first few links if it isn't the first link in the article. This article links to the research in this text:

> The research was published in the [Journal of Human Evolution] last week.

The link in question is this one (https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S00472484240008...) but it points to the following DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2024.103577

Yeah I guess my hot-take is that exaggerating summary articles maybe shouldn't exist at all, or not be shared on HN. What I've found is that, and this article is a great example, the summarizing article is more likely to lead to a less accurate picture than no article at all.

"Puberty hasn't changed" is not what this article concludes. And rightly so, because that's much too broad a statement do draw from taking 13 paleolithic skeletons.

As a tween, living in the idyllic shadow of high-tension transmission lines, I would frolic in the warm summer rain with warbling gay frogs, sampling a bowl of thick, delicious paint chips, and sipping fluoridated water from a tall glass with a little pink umbrella, and see how I turned out!

> Puberty Hasn’t Changed Since the Ice Age

As kids have gotten fat puberty is many years earlier. There is no doubt on this [1]

They can't pretend they are talking genetics, i.e. if you made Ice Age kids fat they also would hit puberty earlier, they don't have the data. It's also not how you'd phrase it.

> puberty had begun by 13.5 years of age—only slightly later than most humans today.

This is years later, for girls is currently less than 10. It's also nonsensical since boys and girls differ.

Distribution for girls- https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Distribution-of-the-age-...

Journal Article -

> Assessing the age of menarche was challenging due to the paucity of female adolescents, but based on the available evidence, it appears to have occurred between 16 and 17 years of age.

It's < 13 now

[1] In the interests of not being a biased cunt, I would say it first was pushed lower with better health, which is a great thing, then society kept on going.

My bro theory is that it's sugar, not that much obesity which is driving it lower.

A "perpetual spring" for the human body due to constant fructose/sucrose consumption.

Another potential factor are estrogen-mimicking endocrine disruptors that are found in many widely used plastics.

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