In one study, researchers looked at dentine-the tissue that forms beneath enamel-in modern Greek people, compared to prehistoric Middle Eastern communities. The dental record can also reveal important markers of health to anthropologists. “To what extent this dietary shift reflected active hunting, or the gathering of small prey such as arthropods, or scavenging, or a combination of all these, is still unclear, but something plainly happened,” writes paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall in The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack and Other Cautionary Tales from Human Evolution. Apes living in trees were still ordering off the prix-fixe menu of the jungle, whereas the more human-like hominins had expanded their palate to the buffet offerings of jungle and savannah.Ĭarbon signatures of the ancient teeth show that Lucy and her kin had expanded beyond fruits and soft buds of trees and shrubs to actually eating other animals the development of thicker enamel reflects that they had also developed more protection to eat seeds, nuts and roots. Chemical analysis of her teeth shows that, as far back as 4 million years ago, the diets of hominins suddenly became much more diversified than other primates. Take, for example, the Australopithecine Lucy. While the marine diet of ancient Croations is exciting news for scientists, other finds have proven just as spectacular.
Sabena Jane Blackbird / Alamy Diet and Health The famous Lucy skeleton belongs to the species Australopithecus afarensis. Taung Child Australopithecus africanus, Australopithecus afarensis and Homo erectus.
#TEETH GEMS ANCIENT WINDOWS#
“They truly are little windows into the life of an individual.” Explore some of the most exciting discoveries made with the help of ancient chompers, and the technology that’s making these insights possible. “I’m constantly amazed by what I find when examining teeth,” Krueger said.
Teeth may seem humble compared to more dazzling specimens like skulls, but the bony protuberances offer more than their share of surprises. She and her colleagues have already discovered that meat doesn’t leave microwear signatures, which could change how scientists analyze the teeth of hominins believed to be particularly carnivorous, like Neanderthals.
#TEETH GEMS ANCIENT SIMULATOR#
The chewing simulator imitates a human jaw to reveal how noshing on different foods impact the teeth, looking to see whether those foods leave tiny abrasions on the machine’s “teeth.” “This has significant implications in our understanding of hominin diets, especially those hominis who are thought to consume a large amount of meat,” Krueger said by email. Krueger assembles those puzzle pieces with the help of a robotic device called ART, for Artificial Resynthesis Technology. As paleoanthropologist Kristin Krueger puts it, teeth are “little pieces of a puzzle that could help see the ‘big picture’ of someone’s life.” Everything from the tooth’s shape to its enamel thickness tells researchers something about the human whose mouth the tooth once inhabited: what they ate, where they lived, what diseases they had. In other words, teeth are like the pennies of ancient human remains they turn up everywhere.īut unlike pennies, they’re often a treasure trove. That’s because the enamel covering a tooth is already 97 percent mineral, and teeth are stronger than bones, so they’re more likely to survive, writes anthropologist Peter Ungar in Evolution’s Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins. Teeth are disproportionately prevalent in archaeological sites: scientists often find dozens or hundreds for every skeleton or skull. This finding, published in a recent Nature study, is just one of myriad discoveries made possible by the archaeological miracles that are teeth. T hat calcified bacterial gunk is helping researchers understand the diet of these hunter-gatherers-once thought to be a nearly impossible task, since there are so few human remains from the time period, and foodstuff doesn’t generally survive in the fossil record. Scientists know this thanks to a handful of ancient teeth, whose plaque revealed microfossils of fish scales, fish flesh and starch granules. Ten thousand years ago, Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of the Croatian Peninsula caught fish (perhaps using their teeth to remove the scales) and foraged for starchy plants.
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