Archeology you can get your teeth into
Print Edition
An international team led by Chinese archeologists has found that a relative of modern humans living at least 104,000 years ago in northern China had similar dental growth to that of modern humans.
The study, published in the journal Science Advances, revealed that the east Asian archaic humans may have had prolonged childhood dependency like modern humans.
It is the first systematic assessment of dental growth in a fossil known as the Xujiayao juvenile, who lived between 104,000 and 248,000 years ago. The growth lines in the teeth showed that the juvenile was about 6 and half years old.
Xing Song, associate research fellow at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, called the Xujiayao juvenile 鈥渁 strange mosaic.鈥
鈥淚t has some affinities to archaic human relatives like the Denisovans and Neanderthals but with some modern features,鈥 said Xing.
Teeth of modern humans take a longer time to develop than those of their primate cousins so the juvenile would have needed prolonged care.
The study showed that the hominin juvenile鈥檚 first molar came through a few months before his death and started to wear, similar to the schedule of modern people.
Scientists also found the perikymata, pits around the long prisms of tooth enamel, were similar to modern humans.
But the Xujiayao juvenile鈥檚 teeth roots grew quicker than those in modern humans.
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