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Dental Anthropology

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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology

Introduction

In some respects, the dentition is a battleground. For organisms that use teeth to process food, tooth loss is directly related to survival – lose your teeth, lose your life (Lucas 2004). Cultural buffering during the later stages of human evolution removed this dramatic relationship, but dental conditions are nonetheless dictated by long-term evolution, not recent cultural advances. For that reason, human teeth, along with the teeth of all vertebrates, were formed under the influence of natural selection. For animals that eat meat, the dentition has slicing, dicing, and piercing elements with minimal emphasis on crushing and grinding teeth. Conversely, browsers and grazers process large quantities of plant foods and thereby have teeth devoted primarily to crushing and grinding, with little need for slicing and dicing. For omnivores, including most primates, the dentition processes a more varied assortment of foods so their teeth are not as specialized as those of...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada Reno, Reno, NV, 89557, USA

    G. Richard Scott

Authors
  1. G. Richard Scott
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Correspondence to G. Richard Scott .

Section Editor information

  1. Department of Forensic Medicine, Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, Monash University, Southbank, VIC, Australia

    Soren Blau

  2. The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense, EAAF), Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Luis Fondebrider

  3. National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA

    Douglas H. Ubelaker

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Scott, G.R. (2018). Dental Anthropology. In: Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_138-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_138-2

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