Interglobular dentine attributed to vitamin D deficiency visible in cremated human teeth

Abstract

Vitamin D deficiency has hugely impacted the health of past societies. Its identification in skeletal remains provides insights into the daily activities, cultural habits, and the disease load of past populations. However, up till now, this approach remained impossible in cremated bones, because temperatures reached during cremations destroyed all macroscopic evidence of vitamin D deficiency. This precluded the analyses of a large fraction of the archaeological record, as cremation was an important burial ritual from the Late Neolithic until the Early Medieval period in Europe. Here, the identification of interglobular dentine (IGD), a dental mineralisation defect attributed to vitamin D deficiency, in experimentally burnt teeth, demonstrates this deficiency to be observable in human teeth burned to temperatures as high as 900 °C. In most cases, it becomes even possible to assess the ages-of-occurrence as well as the severity of the IGD and possibly vitamin D deficiency intensity. This study represents a major step forward in the fields of biological anthropology, archaeology, and palaeopathology by opening up a variety of new possibilities for the study of health and activities related to sunlight exposure of numerous past populations that practiced cremation as their funerary ritual.

Hypomineralization disorder in tropical Southeast Asia during the agricultural revolution: Analysis of morbidity and mortality

“…We emphasize that given the variable approaches to the diagnosis of hypomineralization disorder in the field and the deeply complex situation of co‐morbidity of different diseases at Man Bac, our findings are largely exploratory and open to reinterpretation in the future. There are also recent microscopic, radiographic, and micro‐computed tomography approaches available to independently assess hypomineralization of bone and dentine (Brickley, Kahlon, & D'Ortenzio, 2020; Snoddy et al, 2021; Veselka & Snoeck, 2021; Welsh et al, 2020), but these were published following the data collection for this research project that was conducted in 2018.…”