Article2020

Blurred time resolution of tooth dentin serial sections

32 citations0/0 files storedAmerican Journal of Physical Anthropology

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Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies Archaeology and ancient environmental studies Isotope Analysis in Ecology

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: The growth of tooth dentin is incremental, so its formation represents a dietary record in early life. With archeological skeletons, applying sequential stable isotope analysis to the horizontal sections of tooth dentin has revealed weaning patterns and dietary changes that took place during childhood. However, the assignment of ages to dentin serial sections (DSSs) is problematic due to the changing extension rate and oblique growth layers of dentin, and these effects have not been quantified. This study presents a mathematical model for investigating the corresponding age range of the horizontal DSSs of human permanent incisors, canines, and molars. METHODS: Parameters describing the tooth dentin microstructure were taken from previous studies, and dentin growth patterns were modeled. The model was implemented as the R package MDSS. RESULTS: The developed model shows that the true corresponding age of the sections differed by a few years on average from the estimated age with equal temporal divisions, that the model gave values extending across a wide range, and that these differences become large for sections formed at older ages. The stable isotope ratio of the sections presented an aggregate representation of possibly complex dietary changes across a few years, and dietary changes over short times, such as several months, could not be accurately reconstructed even when using a finer horizontal sectioning method. CONCLUSIONS: These results demonstrate that DSSs correspond to an unexpectedly wider (i.e., three to four times) and different (i.e., -2 to 0.5 years on average) age range than previously assumed and that complicated patterns of dietary change blur in the isotopic trajectory of the sections. Alternative experimental methods, such as imaging-assisted oblique sampling, should be used to retrieve an accurate and precise sequential dietary record from tooth dentin.

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References

1996Dental Anthropology 2014Accuracy of dental age estimation charts: Schour and Massler, Ubelaker and the London Atlas 2007Incremental dental development: Methods and applications in hominoid evolutionary studies 1996Human population variability in relative dental development 2015Oral histories: a simple method of assigning chronological age to isotopic values from human dentine collagen 2020A guide for an anatomically sensitive dentine microsampling and age‐alignment approach for human teeth isotopic sequences 2013Human Life History Evolution Explains Dissociation between the Timing of Tooth Eruption and Peak Rates of Root Growth 2018The role of infant life histories in the construction of identities in death: An incremental isotope study of dietary and physiological status among children afforded differential burial

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