Abstract
Characterizing dental development in fossil hominins is important for distinguishing between them and for establishing where and when the slow overall growth and development of modern humans appeared. Dental development of australopiths and early Homo was faster than modern humans. The Atapuerca fossils (Spain) fill a barely known gap in human evolution, spanning ~1.2 to ~0.4 million years (Ma), during which H. sapiens and Neandertal dental growth characteristics may have developed. We report here perikymata counts, perikymata distributions and periodicities of all teeth belonging to the TE9 level of Sima del Elefante, level TD6.2 of Gran Dolina (H. antecessor) and Sima de los Huesos. We found some components of dental growth in the Atapuerca fossils resembled more recent H. sapiens. Mosaic evolution of perikymata counts and distribution generate three distinct clusters: H. antecessor, Sima de los Huesos and H. sapiens.
Highlights
Characterizing dental development in fossil hominins is important for distinguishing between them and for establishing where and when the slow overall growth and development of modern humans appeared
When compared to modern humans, previous studies on perikymata number expressed on the anterior dentition in H. antecessor and Sima de los Huesos hominins, showed that Atapuerca Early and Middle Pleistocene hominins had a lower number of perikymata than H. sapiens[10,26]
We evaluated the number and distribution of perikymata over 286 teeth: 96 from Sima de los Huesos, 22 from H. antecessor and 168 unworn teeth from a sample of different H. sapiens populations (Table S1)
Summary
Characterizing dental development in fossil hominins is important for distinguishing between them and for establishing where and when the slow overall growth and development of modern humans appeared. Studies on dental enamel growth and relative dental development have been carried out in different hominin populations, from australopiths[1,2,3,4], to early Homo[5], H. naledi[6], a Chinese specimen of the early Late Pleistocene[7,8], Neandertals[9,10,11,12], and archaic/modern H. sapiens[13,14,15,16] Some of these works focused exclusively on the anterior dentition[1,2,5,6,10] while others employed crude estimates to reconstruct missing portions of the worn crown[17]. The methods used to reconstruct worn teeth in previous studies are imprecise and in many studies the posterior dentition (premolars and molars) were not included in their analyses
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