In a small area in northeastern Italy, researchers found three baby teeth derived from three Neanderthal children who lived between 45,000 and 70,000 years ago.  

In the same way that trees have annual rings, teeth have growth lines.

The researchers examined the cells in the enamel of the baby teeth, which shows how fast the teeth have grown.

The researchers discovered that Neanderthal infants grew at the same rate as humans, and they cared for their children in the same way that we humans do.  

- Modern people introduce solid foods around six months when the child needs more energy.

Our research shows that Neanderthals also began weaning children from breast milk at that age and providing food, says Allesia Nava from the University of Kent, UK and one of the researchers behind the study.  

 Similar infants and the same rate of reproduction 

The new findings indicate that Neanderthal infants had the same energy needs as human children.

The results also suggest that the newborns of the Neanderthals probably had the same weight as modern infants.  

- The development curve in small Neanderthal children was similar to that of modern man, says Alessia Nava.  

The discovery is interesting because there is a hypothesis that the Neanderthals died out in competition with humans because our older relative had a slower rate of reproduction, they had children less often than Homo sapiens.

This would have been due to the fact that their development from birth to adulthood was slower.  

Changed image of women's fertility 

Evidence of this is an earlier finding from Neanderthals' baby teeth that showed that babies were turned away from breast milk later - at seven to nine months of age.

This means that women at that time were not as fertile as humans.  

But the new baby teeth from Italy show that this is not the case.

The fact that Neanderthal babies stopped breastfeeding at about the same time as modern babies suggests that Neanderthal women could have children as often as we do.  

- Our results thus do not support the hypothesis that the long infertility after childbirth was a contributing factor to the extinction of Neanderthals, says Alessia Nava.  

 "Only three baby teeth are not enough to draw conclusions" 

Lars Werdelin, professor and paleontologist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History who has read the study, thinks it is interesting that the weaning process from breast milk is so similar to how we humans work.  

- This is a fundamental part of our biology and shows how similar we Neanderthals are, he says.  

The shortcoming in the study, according to Lars Werdelin, is the limited amount of data, only three baby teeth. 

- It can not be guaranteed that these are representative of their species, he says.  

But the baby teeth provide another piece of the puzzle to our understanding of the Neanderthals. 

- For the past 150 years, we have gone from seeing Neanderthals as wild cavemen without any intelligence to being a species that is very similar to us, albeit a little different.

The more we learn about them, the more similar they become to us, Lars Werdelin concludes.  

The study is published in the journal PNAS.