Comparative performance of deciduous and permanent dental morphology in detecting biological relatives

Abstract

Overall, morphological traits of permanent tooth crowns perform moderately well in distinguishing relatives from non-relatives, but deciduous crown variations may provide a more direct reflection of the underlying genetic structure of intra-site or intra-cemetery samples. These findings have implications for bioarchaeological research and biodistance practices. In particular, morphological traits of the deciduous dentition should be incorporated into standard data collection protocols because of their stronger signal of relatedness.

Dental morphology of deciduous molars from late Neolithic Caves of the Meuse River Basin of Belgium

“…Alternatively, these populations may have had only a limited amount of regional gene flow during the late Neolithic period. Previous studies indicate that deciduous dental morphology approximates, to a greater extent than the secondary dentition, the ge-netic relationships among individuals (Kitagawa et al, 1995;Paul and Stojanowski, 2017). To the degree to which this is also true of these Neolithic cave burials, it can be assumed the people represented at Hastière Caverne M were relatively isolated several centuries prior to a partial restructuring of the regional population associated with the Bronze Age.…”

“…The morphology of the deciduous teeth has been examined in studies of modern humans (Hanihara, 1961;Edgar and Lease, 2007;Pilloud and Larsen, 2011), Pleistocene Homo (Smith and Tillier, 1989;Bailey and Hublin, 2006;Martinón-Torres et al, 2012;Hershkovitz et al, 2016;Zubova et al, 2016) and the African apes (Hardin and Legge, 2013). Because primary crown formation time is shorter, environmental pressures are reduced, resulting in a tendency of the deciduous dentition to preserve the ancestral condition more often than permanent successors (Paul and Stojanowski, 2017;Scott et al, 2018 (Kitagawa et al, 1995;Paul and Stojanowski, 2017), and are better at distinguishing groups than metric traits (Sciulli, 1977). Although deciduous and permanent teeth may not differ in proxies of environmental stability, such as fluctuating asymmetry (Guatelli-Steinberg et al, 2006), the primary dentition has fewer cases of agenesis or supernumerary teeth compared to adult successors (Scott et al, 2018).…”

Familial occurrence of skeletal developmental anomalies as a reflection of biological relationships in a genealogically documented Central European sample (19th to 20th centuries)

“…On the other hand, in general it is a disorder of the fusion of the sacrum arches, and in the case of complete cleft neural arches of S1-S5, there are already records of familial occurrence over several generations (Vlček, 2000). Although Evaluation of SDA does not allow for a precise reconstruction of exact kinship relationships at the individual level, similarly to other osteological or dental features (e.g., Brown, 2015;Cameriere et al, 2008;Paul & Stojanowski, 2017). However, these results confirm that this approach can be used as a support tool for the detection of biological affinity, both in paleoanthropology and bioarchaeology (Case et al, 2017;Palancar et al, 2020;Ríos et al, 2015Ríos et al, , 2019, and in forensic practice, for example, in the process of individual identification (Macaluso & Lucena, 2014;Verna et al, 2013Verna et al, , 2015.…”

Population history of southern Italy during Greek colonization inferred from dental remains

“…Slightly lower correlations have been found for populations at a regional level, with an agreement of r = 0.500 (Hubbard et al, ). At the within‐population level, mixed results have been found, ranging from moderate to strong concordance (Paul & Stojanowski, , ; Stojanowski & Hubbard, ). However, it has to be noted that all previous studies used either metric or nonmetric data, although it has been shown that combining metric with nonmetric markers in a single analysis increases performance compared to using the features separately (Hefner et al, ; Lease & Sciulli, ).…”

“…More importantly, tooth form has been proposed to be highly heritable and selectively neutral, thus providing an excellent proxy for neutral genetic data (Hillson, ; Scott & Turner, ). In fact, several recent studies have demonstrated the utility of dental phenotypic data in reconstructing genetic relatedness across human populations on different geographic scales (Hubbard, Guatelli‐Steinberg, & Irish, ; Rathmann et al, ) and even between individuals within a population (Paul & Stojanowski, , ; Ricaut et al, ; Stojanowski & Hubbard, ). Finally, dental phenotypic data can be sampled in a nondestructive, cost‐efficient, and straightforward manner using crown width and length measurements (dental metrics) and visual scoring of crown and root shape variants (dental nonmetric traits).…”