From the Archives: New research is overturning long-held assumptions about tooth enamel and human diversity.
My particular area of expertise lies in enamel. Tooth enamel, like most trees, leaving behind layers of incremental rings that record what the conditions were like for our teeth while they developed during childhood. The rings for many trees are annual; for human teeth, they’re daily.
People working in my field have drawn many conclusions about human enamel thickness and growth over the past three decades.typically states, for example, that tooth enamel growth speeds up over the years until the enamel cap is fully formed, meaning the space between each ring gets larger and larger as they form. There is a common assumption that this speed of enamel growth is relatively constant between populations.
In addition, the vast majority of work on enamel growth has been done on normally shaped teeth—that is, those without abnormal growths or those unaffected by pathology, such as malnutrition. The largely excluded “unhealthy” teeth may also have interesting things to say.To add to the available data, my colleagues and I examined around 300 teeth from people who lived during a 2,000-year period in Britain that spanned five eras, starting with the Roman Empire and including modern-day society.
With extra work, we might be able to use tooth enamel to learn a lot more about populations where no written records exist.
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