Welcome to Dental Anthropology
Welcome to Dental Anthropology Website…
The term Dental Anthropology first appears in the title of an article published in 1900 by George Buschan, although Klatsky and Fisher are credited with its formal introduction. The field is rooted in French, German, and English encyclopedic mammalian odontological treatises of the past two centuries. That teeth possess qualities valuable for anthropological study (i.e., they are durable; evolutionarily conservative and yet adaptable; rich with genetically determined traits; and reflective of behavior, ecology, and diet) was recognized, if not fully explicated, by such 19th century natural historians as L. Rousseau, G. Koch, J. Henle, and R. Owen.
Dental anthropology is academically located within the human bone biology studies. Its main goal is to recognize attributes in the teeth form which can help us create biocultural dynamics of human populations specifically related to health-illness state, feeding habits and microevolutionary transformations, related themselves to the ethnogenesis of current and ancient times. In Dental Anthropology, teeth are used to obtain information on culture, health, diet, variability and evolutionary trends in dental morphology as well as development, eruption and dental pathologies in the past and modern populations.
Dental anthropology is the study of people from the evidence provided by their teeth. It has been one of the less well known sub-disciplines of anthropology. Dental papers are regularly published in the main anthropological journals, different dental journals and there is a Dental Anthropology Association with more than 200 active members and its own journal. Epidemiological dental anthropology helps us to understand the differences in the prevalence of oral health, dental diseases, and dental variations in the living populations of world which are presumably due to environmental and ethnic variability. Teeth and bones are the main research material for anthropologists who study the fossil remains of hominids and other primates, human remains from archaeological sites, and forensic cases.
There are particular advantages in studying teeth, however. They survive better in the ground because they are tougher and more heavily mineralized than bone, and they are among the most common fossils found. Teeth provide a protected environment for the survival of biochemical information and microscopic detail. Once formed in childhood, their component tissues do not turn over like bone, so the sequence of formation is preserved inside them as layered structures. Scattered teeth from one individual can be matched up by this layering pattern, and it is possible to reconstruct the timing of formation. Dental development is known from X-ray studies of living children and, as the sequence is less variable than bone development, it is the best method for estimating age at death in children’s remains. Once in the mouth, teeth are exposed to all food that enters the body, and they are used for many purposes besides eating. They were an important part of the toolkit of recent hunter-gatherers, whose lifestyle left its mark in the pattern of dental wear and the epidemiology of dental caries and periodontal disease. Strong contrasts are shown between hunter-gatherers and early agriculturalists, and with later townspeople. Teeth therefore provide some of the best evidence for reconstructing the life of a person from their fragmentary remains. It is possible to estimate age at death in adults, from the state of wear in the rapidly wearing teeth of past populations, or from age-related histological changes in the roots of modern forensic cases. Tooth size varies between men and women and this can be used to distinguish girls from boys where the skeleton is insufficiently developed to yield many clues.
Tooth size also figures in the broader scale of human evolution — dental reduction is one of the most prominent evolutionary changes over the past 30,000 years. There is also variation in the form of cusps, roots and other features which appear with characteristic frequencies in broad geographical groupings of living populations, and provide important evidence for the way in which modern humans evolved.
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This site has been designed to provide you, the student, the researcher, the dentist, or any body interested in teeth the fundamental knowledge of the human dentition including: morphology, anatomy, embryology, growth and development, pathology, oral health, dental diseases, dental variations, occlusal variations, oral hygiene, oral habits, information regarding research in dental anthropology, important books and research papers on the above mentioned subject, original articles and references, tips to protect your oral cavity to name a few. This site has broader aims which will be duly reflected in its contents. The main intention is to provide an introduction as well as a reference for specialists and I hope that it will contribute to further research.
It will also be a good source for advanced student essays and seminars; I hope it will provide excellent concise history of dental anthropology, covering overall, most areas of dental anthropology although not all in the same detail. Specialist dental anthropologists, biological/physical anthropologists, forensic scientists, clinical dentists, orthodontists, and researchers working in the field of oral/ dental health will find it useful.