Modern life takes puberty back to Stone Age patterns

Peter Gluckman

Some children aged 10 and 11 are sexually mature, according to an Auckland researcher, Professor Peter Gluckman, who says neither they nor society are suitably prepared for the implications.

"We have to work out a new set of structures - schooling, for example - to deal with this reality," said Professor Gluckman, who heads Auckland University's Liggins Institute.

But research he carried out with Professor Mark Hanson of Southampton University - and which they published in a scientific journal, Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism - has shown that the early puberty is nothing new.

The two men found that paleolithic girls arrived at menarche - the first occurrence of menstruation - between seven and 13 years. They would have been psychosocially mature enough to function as adults in the small groups of hunter-gatherers.

But as humans settled, disease and poor nutrition delayed puberty. Now, modern hygiene and medicine meant the age of menarche was returning to Stone Age times.

Society was now vastly more complex, meaning that humans were sexually mature long before they reached psychosocial maturity.

"All our social systems work on the presumption that the two types of maturity coincide," he said.

"But this is no longer the case and never will be again because we cannot change biological reality."

- NZPA