Voice cracking, menstruation: B.C. research sheds light on Ice Age puberty

A pubescent teenager is seen in an undated Shutterstock image.

Teenagers who lived 25,000 years ago likely experienced the same stages of puberty as modern adolescents, and on a similar timeline, according to a new joint study.

That includes a stage where the Paleolithic teens would have endured the same awkward, cracking voices that plague high school students to this day.

The findings were published Thursday in the Journal of Human Evolution, and detail the first evidence of puberty in adolescents who died during the last Ice Age. 

Paleontologists April Nowell from the University of Victoria and archaeologist Mary Lewis from the University of Reading co-led the project, collaborating with researchers from several other universities around the world, including in Monaco and Italy.

The team examined the bones of 13 ancient humans for markers of maturation, allowing them to estimate the "timing and tempo" of puberty, from growth spurts to sexual maturation.

"By analyzing specific areas of the skeleton, we inferred things like menstruation and someone’s voice breaking," said Nowell, in a news release from UVic.

Cracking voices occur when pubescent teenagers – more often boys than girls – are adjusting to the sudden growth of their larynx and vocal cords, and tend to last a few months.

The remains used in the study belonged to people who died between the ages of 10 and 20, and were relatively well-preserved thanks to the "practice of formal burial" that was employed during the Upper Paleolithic period, according to the study.

"The rich archaeological record of the period provides a broader contextual framework for interpreting the findings of the puberty-stage assessment, allowing for the exploration of both the biological and sociocultural facets of Upper Paleolithic adolescence," it reads.

The researchers found most of the teenagers entered puberty by 13.5 years old, similar to adolescents today. There was also much variety in the timing, as there is today, with some notable outliers.

"Some individuals passed through developmental stages at a similar rate to contemporary humans, whereas others, perhaps due to a more demanding environment (evidenced by skeletal trauma) or due to pathological conditions hidden to us, lagged behind," the study reads.

Nowell suggested the findings could help people conceptualize life during the Pleistocene, which might otherwise be hard to fathom.

"It can sometimes be difficult for us to connect with the remote past, but we all went through puberty, even if we experienced it differently," she said.

"Our research helps to humanize these teens in a way that simply studying stone tools cannot."

The full findings are available online.