Anthropological Concepts in the Development of Masticatory System

Teeth play a fantastic role in the line of mammalian evolution. Apart from being covered in one of nature’s hardest substances so that it can take anything a million years of geology can throw at it, a tooth’s 3D shape is a phenomenally subtle food processing surface. Much like Charles Darwin found out about the beaks of finches, different types of teeth have an evolutionary history as well. Darwin found that the birds’ beaks were specially shaped depending on the type of food they ate. Short, sturdy beaks belonged to finches that needed to crack nuts to get nutrition, while long and pointy beaks were used to poke into the cracks of trees to find juicy insects to eat.

Some of the most noticeable changes in the evolution of the genus have been in the dentition and the jaws which support them. In general, living people have smaller teeth and less robust jaws than people living 25,000 years ago. Neanderthals, from perhaps 120,000 and becoming extinct in Europe after 30,000 years ago, had unusually large incisor and canine teeth, together with several other unique dental features. The oldest British hominin fossil teeth, at about 500,000 years ago, from the Boxgrove site in Sussex, were more significant still. In order to understand such differences, it is essential to see the teeth in the context of their use during life.