Dental Anthropology

Dental anthropology is a tool recently developed by physical anthropologists to describe a given population biologically. The research potential of dental evidence remained under-utilized until the middle of the nineteenth century. It has lately been realized that dental variations, both morphological and metrical, provide valuable information for the reconstruction of phylogenetic relationships among different species (ancient and living), the comparative study of different primate groups, evolutionary changes in dentition, the impact of diet on dentition and also for calculating the degree of biological distance among given communities.
It has been documented that dental features such as the size, shape and form (or complexity) of teeth, and the size of the dental arch are genetically determined. In all assumptions, multiple genes with additive effects control such characters. Dental development starts very early- during infancy (even in the prenatal stage) and early childhood. ...