Legends of Ancient Teeth
Anthropology and Dental Fossils
Anthropology is the study of human adaptation and evolution, and includes all phases of human life, sociocultural, intellectual, and biological. Anthropologists and osteologists examine skeletal remnants to define or assess a variety of characters like gender, race, age at death, wounds and pathologies, build, height, size and even profession. Histological and molecular studies can assist to establish the geographic habitation or diet of the creature. These studies can be used to understand population interactions and resemblances, routines, public health, and migration patterns of early populations as well as to construct phylogenetic, social, and biological concepts of fossil species. In forensics, these investigations may be used to find the identity of a person and assess the time or method of death. Dental anthropology is a divergent sub-field of physical anthropology, trying to solve queries about the development and assortment of humans and our ancestors by examining adaptations in the structure and sizes of human teeth, as well as micro- and molecular breakdown of dental constituents.
Teeth are plentiful in the fossil record and are the predominant fossil samples amongst apes and hominids. Tooth enamel is the hardest tissue in the body, being 96% dense inorganic hydroxyapatite, which makes teeth very resistant to fossilization and any physical or chemical change, unlike bone which is easily destroyed and absorbs components from the nearby environment. Moreover, teeth offer the advantage of allowing evaluation in a “non-destructive, economical, and direct way”. Thus, the significance of the teeth in anthropological studies lies in its “preservability, observability, variability, and heritability.”
Teeth are a vital part of physical anthropology, not only because they are an enduring part of the body and last indefinitely in the fossil traces, but because of what morphological changes (metric and non-metric) as well as pathologies can tell us about past peoples. Tooth stature are under strong genetic control, and growth is quite impartial to the more manipulable (environmentally inclined) orofacial tissues, making teeth more genetically explanatory than their skeletal counterparts. This means that dental morphological data may be used as a substitution for genetic data, especially when examining population resemblances and evolutionary connections. Teeth are also a tremendous reservoir of ancient DNA.
Teeth are mainly susceptible to physical and biological damage, unlike other skeletal components, because they are a direct link to the outer environment. Studying pathological or intentional changes to the teeth can tell us not only about the person being studied, but the background, foods, and healthiness of a population. Alterations to the teeth, mainly dental job, are immensely valuable in forensic documentation.
Professional, social, and routine behaviors can be seen from physical alterations to tooth structure, from deliberate evulsion to noticeable indentations from tooth-picking. Indentations on back teeth have also been credited to the removal of muscley material from animal prey. Deliberate disfigurement of teeth, frequently the front teeth for decorative or social customs has been a tradition for several thousands of years in the Americas, Africa, and parts of Asia.
Diets can be concluded by outlines of tooth wear. Usually, hunter-gatherers display more occlusal wear than agriculturalists, mainly in the front teeth which were frequently used to process hides. Agriculturalists that used rock grinding tools to process grains display increased roughness and deeply scratched back teeth. While tooth wear has significantly reduced since the Middle Ages, there has been a simultaneous upsurge in caries, non-carious cervical lesions, and erosion, stemming from dietary as well as food-processing transformations.
The beginning of agriculture and dependance on fermentable carbohydrates has led to a severe spread in dental caries, which developed into a major health bane after 1500. In the past, social status and sex may have affected the spreading of caries because of an inadequate and imbalanced division of high sugar foods; in modern times, females constantly prevail in the higher caries rate index than males, with illuminating theories ranging from frequent snacking to hormonal imbalances throughout pregnancy.
