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According to a statement released by the University of Tübingen, an international team of researchers has studied the effects of climate change on hunter-gatherers living in Europe between 47,000 and 7,000 years ago by analyzing their teeth with a machine learning algorithm called Pheno-ABC. "This has allowed us to collect an unprecedented dataset [including some 450 prehistoric humans from all over Europe] that is significantly larger than previous skeletal and genetic datasets," said Hannes Rathmann of the University of Tübingen. The researchers focused on inheritable features of teeth, such as their shape, the ridge and groove patterns on the chewing...

A new paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution, published by Oxford Univeristy Press, uncovers well-preserved microbiomes from two 4,000 year old teeth in a limestone cave in Ireland. These contained bacteria that cause gum disease, as well as the first high quality ancient genome from S. mutans, an oral bacterium that is one of the major causes of tooth decay.These discoveries allowed the researchers to assess the impact of past dietary changes on the oral microbiome across millennia, including major changes coinciding with the popularization of sugar and industrialization. The teeth, both derived from the same Bronze Age man, also...

November 21, 2022 Share Email 592205.jpg Credit: U.S. Military One of the keys to bringing home unidentified military remains, including POW/MIAs and the more than 81,500 soldiers unaccounted for in conflicts dating back to World War II, is using science to determine where home might be. University of Utah scientists are engaged in an effort, in support of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, to develop methods that can trace the geographic origin of remains, particularly teeth. Why teeth? Because everyone’s body, including their teeth, contains a record of where they’ve lived and traveled in the form of various stable isotopes...

Dental Detectives Reveal Diet of Ancient Human Ancestors Sean Markey for National Geographic News November 9, 2006 Paranthropus robustus, a dead-end branch of the early human family tree, has been described as a "chewing machine" that was mostly jaws and not much brains. While the label may still apply, pioneering dental detective work has revealed unexpected news about the species' dietary variety. Using lasers to vaporize tiny particles of tooth enamel, researchers in the United States and Great Britain analyzed the chemical makeup of 1.8-million-year-old fossil teeth from four individuals unearthed in the Swartkrans cave site in South Africa. Different...

...The results published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) also suggest tooth decay was more prevalent in earlier societies than previously estimated. The results also suggest that the hunter-gatherer society studied may have developed a more sedentary lifestyle than previously thought, relying on nut harvesting. Dental disease was thought to have originated with the introduction of farming and changes in food processing around 10,000 years ago. A greater reliance on cultivated plant foods, rich in fermentable carbohydrates, resulted in rotting teeth.High level of decayNow, the analysis of 52 adult dentitions from hunter-gatherer skeletons found in a cave...

Hunter-gatherers had almost no malocclusion and dental crowding, and the condition first became common among the world's earliest farmers some 12,000 years ago in Southwest Asia... By analysing the lower jaws and teeth crown dimensions of 292 archaeological skeletons from the Levant, Anatolia and Europe, from between 28,000-6,000 years ago, an international team of scientists have discovered a clear separation between European hunter-gatherers, Near Eastern/Anatolian semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers and transitional farmers, and European farmers, based on the form and structure of their jawbones... In the case of hunter-gatherers, the scientists from University College Dublin, Israel Antiquity Authority, and the State University...

When tooth enamel forms, it incorporates elements from the local environment -- the food one eats, the water one drinks, the dust one breathes. When the researchers looked at remains from the ancient city of Harappa, located in what is known today as the Punjab Province of Pakistan, individuals' early molars told a very different story than their later ones, meaning they hadn't been born in the city where they were found... The text of the Indus Valley Civilization remains undeciphered, and known and excavated burial sites are rare. A new study, published in today's PLOS ONE, illuminates the lives...

DNA evidence lifted from the ancient bones and teeth of people who lived in Europe from the Late Pleistocene to the early Holocene -- spanning almost 30,000 years of European prehistory -- has offered some surprises, according to researchers who report their findings in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on Feb. 4, 2016. Perhaps most notably, the evidence shows a major shift in the population around 14,500 years ago, during a period of severe climatic instability... The researchers pieced this missing history together by reconstructing the mitochondrial genomes of 35 hunter-gatherer individuals who lived in Italy, Germany, Belgium, France,...

Scientists have found traces of rampant tooth decay in the teeth of people living almost 9,000 years ago in today's Poland. According to the researchers from the Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw, the disease, which is also known as [cavities], could have been the result of consuming too much fruit and honey. Traditionally, it was thought that tooth decay became common only after man began to lead a sedentary lifestyle and use more processed cereal products. But, with farmers not appearing in Poland until about 7,000 years ago, the 9,000-year-old discovery has taken the scientists by surprise... Professor Jacek...

Since the fourth millennium BCE, when urban civilizations first appeared in ancient Mesopotamia, humans have strived to achieve proper dental hygiene. Yet the nylon-bristled toothbrush we use today didn’t come along until the 1930s. For the thousands of years in between, people relied on rudimentary tools that evolved with scientific knowledge and technological advancements over time. Some of the earliest toothbrush predecessors date as far back as 3500 BCE. Here’s a look at how people kept their teeth clean before the modern toothbrush.AdvertisementChew Sticks and ToothpicksSometime around the year 3500 BCE, the ancient Babylonians (located near modern-day Iraq) created a...

In a new analysis of thousands of teeth from ancient skeletons buried at a site near Naples, Italy, archaeologists have discovered that people were using their mouths to help with their work -- occupations that likely involved processing hemp into string and fabric. We all use our teeth as tools -- to open bottles, hold pieces of paper, or even smoke a pipe. When we do this, we open ourselves up to the possibility of cracking our teeth but also create microscopic grooves and injuries to the enamel surface. Since teeth don't remodel like bones do, these tiny insults remain...

Teeth from long-dead people and animals are divulging the history of modern-day pathogens.Ancient DNA extracted from the teeth of humans who lived long ago is yielding new information about pathogens past and present. In one of the latest studies, researchers uncovered and sequenced ancient herpes genomes for the first time, from the teeth of long-dead Europeans. The strain of herpes virus that causes lip sores in people today — called HSV-1 — was once thought to have emerged in Africa more than 50,000 years ago. But the new data, published in Science Advances on 27 July1, indicate that its origin...

A man with a metal detector searching a freshly plowed carrot field in Switzerland found a large ornate jewelry set dating to the Bronze Age — as well as other surprising items including a bear's tooth, a beaver's tooth and a fossilized shark's tooth, local officials said this week. Franz Zahn made the unusual discovery in August while he was "out and about in a freshly harvested carrot field" in Güttingen, about 50 miles northeast of Zurich, officials from Thurgau Canton said in a Monday news release. Zahn initially found a bronze disc, and immediately realized it was an "extraordinary...

According to a statement released by the University of Kent, Neanderthal infants may have developed faster than modern human babies, based upon the study of a 120,000-year-old Neanderthal milk tooth discovered in what is now Croatia by an international team of researchers led by Patrick Mahoney of the University of Kent. The enamel that covers baby teeth has lines demarcating enamel produced before and after birth, and the space between the lines indicates how much enamel was grown in a single day, according to prior research. Analysis of the lines in this tooth indicates that the tooth erupted from the...

We're constantly told we should be flossing our teeth - despite it being fiddly, time-consuming and sometimes painful.Figures show that less than a fifth of us actually bother to do it regularly - with many tacky rolls of floss gathering dust in bathrooms the world over.Now, one leading expert has warned that if not performed correctly, flossing can actually do more harm than good.Here, Robin Seymour, Emeritus Professor of Dental Sciences at Newcastle University and leading periodontologist, explains why - and suggests other, easier ways to get perfect pearly-whites...Facebook

In what Prof. Barkai describes as a "time capsule," the analysed calculus revealed three major findings: charcoal from indoor fires; evidence for the ingestion of essential plant-based dietary components; and fibers that might have been used to clean teeth or were remnants of raw materials. "Prof. Karen Hardy published outstanding research on the dental calculus of Neanderthals from El Sidron cave in Spain, but these dated back just 40,000-50,000 years—we are talking far earlier than this," said Prof. Barkai. "This is the first evidence that the world's first indoor BBQs had health-related consequences," said Prof. Barkai. "The people who lived...

Progressive creationist anthropology: many reasons NOT to believe A review of Who was Adam? by Fazale Rana with Hugh Ross Although mostly written by Fazale Rana, the book is said to equally represent the work of Hugh Ross. Their salvos against biblical creationists are mostly confined to the earlier chapters of the book, with the first shot being to blame us for the biblical perspective on human origins not being ‘at the high table of scientific debate’ (p. 12). Here they characterize the approach taken by creationists as largely attacking human evolutionary models, but seldom offering ‘a viable theory of...