Abstract
Dental phenotypic data are often used to reconstruct biological relatedness among past human groups. Teeth are an important data source because they are generally well preserved in the archaeological and fossil record, even when associated skeletal and DNA preservation is poor. Furthermore, tooth form is considered to be highly heritable and selectively neutral; thus, teeth are assumed to be an excellent proxy for neutral genetic data when none are available. However, to our knowledge, no study to date has systematically tested the assumption of genetic neutrality of dental morphological features on a global scale. Therefore, for the first time, this study quantifies the correlation of biological affinities between worldwide modern human populations, derived independently from dental phenotypes and neutral genetic markers. We show that population relationship measures based on dental morphology are significantly correlated with those based on neutral genetic data (on average r = 0.574, p < 0.001). This relatively strong correlation validates tooth form as a proxy for neutral genomic markers. Nonetheless, we suggest caution in reconstructions of population affinities based on dental data alone because only part of the dental morphological variation among populations can be explained in terms of neutral genetic differences.
Highlights
In archaeological and paleontological studies, dental phenotypic data are often used to estimate biological relatedness among past human groups, in order to reconstruct migration events, population histories, or hominin phylogenies[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]
Our results show that kinship estimates between human populations based on dental phenotypes are significantly correlated with those based on neutral genetic data (Table 1, Fig. 3)
Our results validate the use of dental phenotypic data to infer neutral genetic relationships among human populations
Summary
In archaeological and paleontological studies, dental phenotypic data are often used to estimate biological relatedness among past human groups, in order to reconstruct migration events, population histories, or hominin phylogenies[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. Despite the popularity of population genetic studies utilizing dental phenotypes as proxies for genetic markers, less than a handful of studies have attempted to directly test the level of congruence between population distance measures based on these two data types[14,15,16,17] Those previous investigations found contradicting results, with some of them reporting weak to strong correlations, whereas others found that dental and genetic distances produced fundamentally different patterns of group relationships. For the first time, we seek to test for correlations of biological affinities among globally distributed modern human populations, derived independently from diverse dental phenotypic markers (metrics and non-metric traits) and neutral genetic loci (SNPs and STRs). Dow-Cheverud tests were used to determine whether dental metrics or dental non-metric traits are better suited to track neutral genomic relationships as calculated from SNP and STR data
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