Girls hitting puberty earlier? Is milk to blame?

That makes sense.


Again, is puberty solely a physical thing or does it also trigger brain development? Earlier puberty without earlier/faster brain development for either gender could cause problems, but if brain development goes hand in hand with puberty, then there will be some serious problems with girls starting 4-5 years before boys.

All I remember from those classes is "hair and other stuff will start to grow, BUT DO NOT PANIC". More or less.

In a strict sense, the term puberty (derived from the Latin word puberatum (age of maturity, manhood)) refers to the bodily changes of sexual maturation rather than the psychosocial and cultural aspects of adolescent development. Adolescence is the period of psychological and social transition between childhood and adulthood. Adolescence largely overlaps the period of puberty, but its boundaries are less precisely defined and it refers as much to the psychosocial and cultural characteristics of development during the teen years as to the physical changes of puberty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puberty

Even though there is this part:

Puberty is the process of physical changes by which a child's body becomes an adult body capable of reproduction. Puberty is initiated by hormone signals from the brain to the gonads (the ovaries and testes). In response, the gonads produce a variety of hormones that stimulate the growth, function, or transformation of brain, bones, muscle, blood, skin, hair, breasts, and sex organs.

So I'm not quite sure. It's pretty certain they don't overlap, but probably inextricably intertwined.