Dental eruption in East African wild chimpanzees.

Knowledge of chimpanzee development has played an essential role in our understanding of the evolution of human ontogeny. However, recent studies of wild ape dentitions have cast doubt on the use of developmental standards derived from captive individuals. Others have called into question the use of deceased wild individuals to infer normative development. We conducted a high resolution photographic study of living known-age subadults in the Kanyawara community (Kibale National Park, Uganda) to generate a comprehensive three year record of dental eruption (including tooth emergence ages). These non-invasive data allow comparisons of captive and wild chimpanzees, establish accurate developmental standards for relatively healthy wild individuals, and facilitate direct assessments of primate-wide associations between dental development and life history. Emergence ages in the Kanyawara chimpanzees are very similar to living Gombe chimpanzees, and are broadly comparable to deceased Taï Forest chimpanzees. Early-emerging teeth such as the deciduous dentition and first molar (M1) appear during a time of maternal dependence, and are almost indistinguishable from captive chimpanzee emergence ages, while later forming teeth in the Kanyawara population emerge in the latter half of captive age ranges or beyond. Five juveniles whose lower M1s emerged by or before 3.3 years of age continued to nurse for a year or more beyond M1 emergence, and their mothers showed considerable variation in reproductive rates. The third molars of two adolescent females emerged several months to several years prior to the birth of their first offspring. Given that broad primate-wide relationships between molar emergence and life history do not necessarily hold within this population of chimpanzees, particularly for variables that are reported to be coincident with molar emergence, we suggest that further study is required in order to predict life history variables in hominins or hominoids.

State-level tracking of COVID-19 in the United States.

As of 1st June 2020, the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention reported 104,232 confirmed or probable COVID-19-related deaths in the US. This was more than twice the number of deaths reported in the next most severely impacted country. We jointly model the US epidemic at the state-level, using publicly available death data within a Bayesian hierarchical semi-mechanistic framework. For each state, we estimate the number of individuals that have been infected, the number of individuals that are currently infectious and the time-varying reproduction number (the average number of secondary infections caused by an infected person). We use changes in mobility to capture the impact that non-pharmaceutical interventions and other behaviour changes have on the rate of transmission of SARS-CoV-2. We estimate that Rt was only below one in 23 states on 1st June. We also estimate that 3.7% [3.4%-4.0%] of the total population of the US had been infected, with wide variation between states, and approximately 0.01% of the population was infectious. We demonstrate good 3 week model forecasts of deaths with low error and good coverage of our credible intervals.