Dental Ontogeny in Pliocene and Early Pleistocene Hominins
Open accessAbstract
Until recently, our understanding of the evolution of human growth and development derived from studies of fossil juveniles that employed extant populations for both age determination and comparison. This circular approach has led to considerable debate about the human-like and ape-like affinities of fossil hominins. Teeth are invaluable for understanding maturation as age at death can be directly assessed from dental microstructure, and dental development has been shown to correlate with life history across primates broadly. We employ non-destructive synchrotron imaging to characterize incremental development, molar emergence, and age at death in more than 20 Australopithecus anamensis, Australopithecus africanus, Paranthropus robustus and South African early Homo juveniles. Long-period line periodicities range from at least 6-12 days (possibly 5-13 days), and do not support the hypothesis that australopiths have lower mean values than extant or fossil Homo. Crown formation times of australopith and early Homo postcanine teeth fall below or at the low end of extant human values; Paranthropus robustus dentitions have the shortest formation times. Pliocene and early Pleistocene hominins show remarkable variation, and previous reports of age at death that employ a narrow range of estimated long-period line periodicities, cuspal enamel thicknesses, or initiation ages are likely to be in error. New chronological ages for SK 62 and StW 151 are several months younger than previous histological estimates, while Sts 24 is more than one year older. Extant human standards overestimate age at death in hominins predating Homo sapiens, and should not be applied to other fossil taxa. We urge caution when inferring life history as aspects of dental development in Pliocene and early Pleistocene fossils are distinct from modern humans and African apes, and recent work has challenged the predictive power of primate-wide associations between hominoid first molar emergence and certain life history variables.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Compared with early Homo specimens at a comparable stage of dental development, El Sidrón J1 is at least 2.7 years older than the ~2 myr Homo habilis specimen StW 151.
“Compared with early Homo specimens at a comparable stage of dental development, El Sidrón J1 is at least 2.7 years older than a ~2 myr Homo habilis specimen, StW 151, (19)(20)(21)(22) but almost identical in age (7.78 years) to a 315 kyr Homo sapiens specimen from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco (23), that shows a prolonged modern humanlike period of dental developmental (24).”
From The growth pattern of Neandertals, reconstructed from a juvenile skeleton from El Sidrón (Spain) (2017) · cites this paper as [20]
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 111 · Cited by 113
Research works printed but not linked: 4
- [26]Hochberg Z (2012) Evo-devo of child growth. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell 235 p.
- [42]Okada M (1943) Hard tissues of animal body: highly interesting details of Nippon studies in periodic patterns of hard tissues are described. In The Shanghai Evening Post Special Edition, Health, Recreation and Medical Progress, pp. 15–31.
- [66]Schwartz JH, Tattersall I (2005) The human fossil record, vol 4 New York: Wiley-Liss 561 p.
- [68]Smith TM, Reid DJ, Olejniczak AJ, Tafforeau P, Hublin J-J, et al (2014) Dental development and age at death of the Scladina 1–4A juvenile Neanderthal In: Toussaint M, Bonjean D, editors. The Scladina I-4A juvenile neandertal (Andenne, Belgium) palaeoanthropology and context. Liège: Études et Recherches Archéologiques de l’Université de Liège pp. 155– 166.
- Authors
- Smith, T. M., Tafforeau, P., Le Cabec, A., Bonnin, A., Houssaye, A., Pouech, J., Moggi-Cecchi, J., Manthi, F., Ward, C., Makaremi, M., & Menter, C. G.
- Affiliations
- Harvard University (US)
- European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (FR)
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR)
- Lyon 1 Université (FR)
- National Museums of Kenya (KE)
- University of Missouri (US)
- Université de Bordeaux (FR)
- University of Johannesburg (ZA)
- Corresponding author
- Smith, Tanya M.
- Tafforeau, Paul
- ORCID
- Venue
- PLOS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2015-02-18
- Volume
- 10
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- e0118118
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4334485
- OpenAlex
- W2115792168
- Cited by
- 113
- References
- 111
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 10 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 13 · 2019: 19 · 2018: 12 · 2017: 12 · 2016: 8 · 2015: 2
- FWCI
- 47.45
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- HAL (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- DORA PSI (Paul Scherrer Institute) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Florence Research (University of Florence) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) (Harvard University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Max Planck Digital Library (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Griffith Research Online (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Greater South Information System
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (1126470)
- Harvard University
- National Research Foundation
- Griffith University
- Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Anthropology › Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Archeology › Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Paleontology › Evolution and Paleontology Studies
- Keywords
- dental ontogeny, age at death, dental histology, Australopithecus anamensis, Australopithecus africanus, Paranthropus robustus, life history, synchrotron imaging
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Biological Evolution, Fossils, Tooth, Hominidae
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
