Fossil profile: Krapina 49 maxilla
Shovel-shaped incisors are a striking anatomical variant in many living people. The upper incisors of most people are gently curved or straight across, and t...
Shovel-shaped incisors are a striking anatomical variant in many living people. The upper incisors of most people are gently curved or straight across, and t...
Notable paper: Zanolli, C., Pan, L., Dumoncel, J., Kullmer, O., Kundrat, M., Liu, W., … & Tuniz, C. (2018). Inner tooth morphology of Homo erectus from ...
A new article in The Atlantic by Sarah Zhang looks at some fascinating detective work on ancient teeth by Christina Warriner and Anita Radini: “Why a Medieva...
A recent paper by Nicolas Stewart and colleagues presents a way to determine the sex of ancient individuals by examining the composition of their tooth ename...
I’d like to point everyone to this new article that may give some insight into the diet or behavior of Homo naledi: “Behavioral inferences from the high leve...
One of the most obvious cases of recent human evolution is the increasing frequency with which individuals don’t develop third molars, what is called “M3 age...
Joanna Klein in the New York Times reports on a new study by Lori D’Ortenzio and colleagues examining the lifetime history of rickets in “Old Teeth Tell New...
I was doing some searching through the abstracts for the upcoming AAPA meetings, and I found that the system gave me abstracts for past meetings as well, so ...
Notable paper: Smith TM, Tafforeau P, Le Cabec A, Bonnin A, Houssaye A, et al. (2015) Dental Ontogeny in Pliocene and Early Pleistocene Hominins. PLoS ONE 10...
M2–M1–dm1.
Notable paper: Maddux, Scott C. et al. 2015. A 750,000 year old hominin molar from the site of Nadung’a, West Turkana, Kenya. Journal of Human Evolution (in ...
Steve Mirsky caught up with Alan Mann for a recent Scientific American 60-second podcast: “Third Molars Illustrate Differential Reproduction”. The result is ...
Ed Yong has a great account today of some research from Alan Cooper’s lab on the oral microbiome in pre-agricultural and post-agricultural Europeans: “Prehis...
Razib Khan has a short but worthwhile post about dental health and heritability: “The moral measure of bad teeth”.
Molecular archaeologist Christina Warinner gave a TED talk and the main ideas are now in a CNN article: “Why your dental plaque is valuable”.
Teeth have a close association with longevity. Enamel is the hardest substance in the body, but it does break, wear out, and is sometimes attacked by microbe...
The incisors are the front teeth. They are basically flat and have a blade-like occlusal surface. Each quadrant has two incisors.
Like most mammals, humans have two sets of teeth. The first set is called the deciduous dentition, but you probably know these as “baby teeth.”
The canine teeth in humans range from pointy-shaped to incisor-like in shape. There is only one canine in each quadrant, and it is the third tooth just dista...
Most humans have three molars, but many — especially in America — have their third molars (called wisdom teeth) extracted. Some people do not develop third m...
The premolars are directly distal to (behind) the canines. Generally there are two premolars in each quadrant. Counting backward from the front of the jaw, t...
Different kinds of primates have different numbers of premolars in their dentitions. The ancestral number of premolars in primates is three in each quadrant ...
The most distal teeth are molars. Most humans have three molars, but many — especially in America — have their third molars (called wisdom teeth) extracted. ...
Goals:
The incisors are the front teeth. They are basically flat and have a blade-like occlusal surface. Each quadrant has two incisors.
Dental plaque is a biofilm made up of bacteria adhering to the enamel surface of the teeth. Plaque is soft but over many days can gradually calcify. The hard...
Writing about the Sarmiento-White exchange (Sarmiento 2010; White et al., 2010) a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I had three areas of comment. The mol...
Alan Boyle reports on two new papers in PNAS. The first concerns the dental development of the Lagar Velho skeleton. The second verges on Neandertal art:
Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg and Donald Reid report on the perikymata spacing of a sample of fourteen anterior teeth from Qafzeh. These are “early modern humans...
Jerry Coyne describes a new paper on the accumulation of loss-of-function mutations to ENAM in lineages with tooth reductions: “Dead Genes for Tooth Enamel”.
Earnest Hooton, on p. 170 of Up From the Ape:
I pointed a couple of weeks ago to the Les Rois Neandertal paper by Ramirez Rozzi and colleagues.
I said I was going to do my best to scoop the press this week. How about this piece of undernews: at one of the few early Aurignacian sites to preserve skele...
Joel Garreau (Radical Evolution) covers the future genetics beat for the Washington Post. In today’s edition, he has an interesting article about tooth regen...
Darwin, in The Descent of Man, volume 1, pp. 26-27:
Dean and colleagues (2001) present a study of perikymata counts of anterior teeth (incisors and canines) in early humans and australopithecines, compared to...