Dental microwear and interproximal tooth wear in Albuquerque AAPA meeting 2010

Posted on Monday, January 4, 2010 in www.microwear.eu


In April 2010 we are presenting two new posters about dental microwear and interproximal tooth wear, in the AAPA meeting - Albuquerque, NM. Here you have the abstracts and the posters.


Buccal dental-microwear analysis among Pygmy hunter-gatherers from Western Central Africa
Alejandro Romero1, Fernado V. Ramírez-Rozzi2, Alain Froment3, Joaquín De Juan1, Alejandro Pérez-Pérez4

1Department of Biotechnology, University of Alicante (Spain), 2CNRS, Dynamique de l’évolution humaine, Paris (France), 3Musée de l’Homme, Paris (France), 4Department of Animal Biology, University of Barcelona (Spain).

Buccal-tooth surface microwear is highly correlated with abrasive particles in foodstuffs during chewing. However, human microwear-dietary models related to ecological and cultural factors are still scarce. African pygmies are foragers’ societies living in the tropical forest. The analysis of enamel microwear in these populations should provide a good model for societies living in similar environmental conditions. Replicas of left-lower M1 were obtained in a sample of in vivo Baka pygmies from southeastern Cameroon (n=42), BaBinga (n=5) and BaBongo (n=6) museum pygmies from Central African, Congo and Gabon, and a control group of Spanish volunteers (n=36). Buccal-microwear was examined with a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) at 100×. Microstriation density and length by orientation (in 45° intervals) from 0° to 180° were measured. Significant differences (ANOVA and Tukey’s HSD tests; p<0.05)>
This study was funded by Spanish GV and MEC, grant numbers BEST/2009/258, CGL2007-60802 and Wenner-Gren Foundation, grant number Gr.7819.


Molar size variation related to age in Amboseli baboons (Papio cynocephalus)
Jordi Galbany1, Laia Dotras2, Jeanne Altmann3, Alejandro Pérez-Pérez2, Susan C. Alberts1.

1Department of Biology, Duke University, 2Department of Animal Biology, University of Barcelona (Spain), 3Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University.

Tooth size is a common variable used in primatological and anthropological studies. It can provide information about tooth development, phylogeny or ecological adaptation. Moreover, several studies have evaluated sexual dimorphism by using dental size in primates; dimorphism is particularly remarkable in the canines. But some researchers have pointed out that tooth size can be modified by the degree of interproximal tooth wear, i.e., wear between the teeth that generates attrition and wears away the rounded profile of the crown. Interproximal tooth wear is known to increase with age in humans, but has not been investigated before in natural populations of non-human primates. In the present study, we examined molar size from a single well-known aged population of wild baboons from Amboseli (Kenya), both males (n=41; from 7.4 to 20.45 years old) and females (n=54; from 5.53 to 26.64 years old). The results showed a significant reduction in the mesiodistal length of lower M1 in males and females, as a function of age. There was also a reduction in upper M1 length as a function of age, significant in females, and also a non-significant trend in reduction of length in the M2 for both sexes. These results demonstrate that molar size, especially M1, is directly related to age due to interproximal wearing caused by M2 and M3 compression loads. Researchers should take into account this phenomenon when measuring tooth length for ondontometric purposes.
This research was funded by the US National Science Foundation (BCS-0323553 and BCS-0323596) and the Spanish CGL2004-00775/BTE and CGL2007-60802 projects.