Viking Teeth

According to New Scientist VIKING warriors may have filed deep grooves into their teeth to indicate class or military rank. From the article: Caroline Arcini of Sweden’s National Heritage Board analysed 557 skeletons from four major Viking-age Swedish cemeteries and discovered that around 10 per cent of men, but none of the women, bore horizontal [...]

Neanderthal Teeth: How Did They Grow?

The above is a human tooth. If you look closely you can see faint grooves running horizontally across it’s surface. These grooves are called perikymata and represent growth. More specifically they represent growth cycles of about 6-14 days. Below is a high magnification detail from a thin section. High magnification detail from the same thin [...]

A New Method of Determining Age From Teeth

This is way cool! The new technique, developed by researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, determines the amount of carbon-14 in tooth enamel. Scientists can relate the extensive atmospheric record for carbon-14 to when the tooth was formed and calculate the age of the tooth, and its owner, [...]

Dental Microwear Analysis and Australopithecines

This is pretty cool. Researchers examined several species of monkey teeth in order to determine the microwear patterns produced by a variety of different diets. They then turned their attention to the teeth of Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus: The new study by Ungar, Brown, and colleagues suggests that, on average, A. africanus probably ate [...]