1,606 different protein types essential for newborn growth
I read that as "if the baby doesn't get all 1,606 of this proteins, it won't develop normally."
That sounds like a ridiculous statement.
It might be, but that's orthogonal to the point I was making, which was "yep actually human breastmilk is significantly different to chimpanzees".
Maybe. A chimpanzee is much closer to a human than a monkey, which already had ~500 of the ~1600 proteins.
I found a handy graph of the primate family: http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v15/n5/fig_tab/nrg3707_F1....
> The time of separation of the human lineage from the rhesus macaque lineage is dated at 28–25 million years ago, whereas the human and chimpanzee lineages are believed to have diverged ~9–5 million years ago.
(http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/13528/20150319/human...)