Orangutan teeth hold key to nursing habits and conservation

A Griffith University researcher hopes a new discovery on orangutan weaning could help conservation efforts for the highly endangered primate.
Associate Professor Tanya Smith, from the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE) team, based in Griffith’s Environmental Futures Research Institute, aged museum specimens using growth lines in their molar teeth and mapped barium, an element found in mothers’ milk, to determine how long they suckle for.
The research, published in Science Advances in collaboration with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and other US scientists, provides the first detailed nursing histories of wild, orangutans. Researchers found immature orangutans may cycle their mothers’ milk consumption annually over more than eight years, weaning much later than other mammals.
Associate Professor Smith, an evolutionary anthropologist who recently arrived to the centre from Harvard University, said new technology allowed researchers to study collections of highly endangered primates from natural history museums,

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