Question: Why do all humans go through puberty? If yes, did the first people on earth went through the same process?

James Verdon answered on 28 Jun 2012:

Hi michaeljackson,
All humans go through puberty, except for a very small number of people with certain genetic diseases. Puberty is the transition from the child-like (technically called the juvenile) form into a sexually mature adult. All animals, not just humans, are not born as sexually mature adults, they are born as juveniles. Therefore at some point they have to undergo a transition to the sexually mature adult form.

So the first humans would have gone through puberty, just as chimps and other apes have puberty stages as well. But the changes we go through during puberty are relatively mild compared to some animals. Think of frogs for example. The frog juvenile form is the tadpole, while the sexually mature form is an adult frog. So for frogs, puberty involves going from a tadpole to a frog, which is a much more dramatic change than we have.

Many animals have juvenile stages that look very different to the adult forms. For example, maggots turn into flies, and caterpillars turn into butterflies. Often, we refer to the juveniles as larvae.