ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2011
Global human mandibular variation reflects differences in agricultural and hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 57 papers.
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57 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Stress, Life History, and Linear Enamel Hypoplasia: Insights From the Indigenous Populations of the Canary Islands.American journal of biological anthropology · 2025Article
- Tracing Human Diversity in South America's Southern Cone: Linguistic, Morphometric, and Genetic Perspectives.American journal of biological anthropology · 2025Article
- From Calibrated Morphs to Facial Stimuli: The Beauty of a Statistically Informed Picture.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Article
- Predictability of maxillary dentoalveolar expansion with clear aligners in patients with mixed dentition.Korean journal of orthodontics · 2025Article
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- Tooth wear and tertiary crowding: a 13-year cohort study in Amazon Indigenous populations.Progress in orthodontics · 2025Article
- Bioclimatic and masticatory influences on human cranial diversity verified by analysis of 3D morphometric homologous models.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Disparate and parallel craniofacial climatic adaptations in native populations of Asia, North America, and South America.Journal of anatomy · 2024Article
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- Demonstrating the empirical effect of population specificity of anthropological standards in a contemporary Australian population.International journal of legal medicine · 2024Article
- Factors influencing cranial variation between prehistoric Japanese forager populations.Archaeological and anthropological sciences · 2024Article
- Mandibular morphology and the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in Westernmost Iberia.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Article
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Abstract
Variation in the masticatory behavior of hunter-gatherer and agricultural populations is hypothesized to be one of the major forces affecting the form of the human mandible. However, this has yet to be analyzed at a global level. Here, the relationship between global mandibular shape variation and subsistence economy is tested, while controlling for the potentially confounding effects of shared population history, geography, and climate. The results demonstrate that the mandible, in contrast to the cranium, significantly reflects subsistence strategy rather than neutral genetic patterns, with hunter-gatherers having consistently longer and narrower mandibles than agriculturalists. These results support notions that a decrease in masticatory stress among agriculturalists causes the mandible to grow and develop differently. This developmental argument also explains why there is often a mismatch between the size of the lower face and the dentition, which, in turn, leads to increased prevalence of dental crowding and malocclusions in modern postindustrial populations. Therefore, these results have important implications for our understanding of human masticatory adaptation.
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