Behavioral strategies of prehistoric and historic children from dental microwear texture analysis

Abstract

Introduction: Reconstructing the dietary and behavioral strategies of our hominin ancestors is crucial to understanding their evolution, adaptation, and overall way of life. Teeth in general, and dental microwear specifically, provide a means to examine these strategies, with posterior teeth well positioned to tell us about diet, and anterior teeth helping us examine non-dietary tooth-use behaviors. Past research predominantly focused on strategies of adult individuals, leaving us to wonder the role children may have played in the community at large. Here we begin to address this by analyzing prehistoric and historic children through dental microwear texture analysis of deciduous anterior teeth. Materials and Methods: Four sample groups were used: Neandertals (N = 8), early modern humans (N = 14), historic Egyptians from Amarna (N = 19) and historic high-Arctic Inuit from Point Hope, Alaska (N = 6). Anterior deciduous teeth were carefully cleaned, molded, and cast with high-resolution materials. Labial surfaces were scanned for dental microwear textures using two white-light confocal microscopes at the University of Arkansas, and a soft filter applied to facilitate data comparisons. Results and Discussion: Results show that dental microwear texture analysis successfully differentiated the samples by all texture variables examined (anisotropy, complexity, scale of maximum complexity, and two variants of heterogeneity). Interestingly, the Neandertal and Point Hope children had similar mean values across all the texture variables, and both groups were significantly different from the Amarna, Egyptian children. These differences suggest diversity in abrasive load exposure and participation in non-dietary anterior tooth-use behaviors. Further analyses and an expanded sample size will help to strengthen the data presented here, but our results show that some prehistoric and historic children took part in similar behaviors as their adult counterparts.