ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Testing the utility of dental morphological trait combinations for inferring human neutral genetic variation.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Reconstruction of Spatial Organization and Cemetery Structure of Preadult Burials at the Phaleron Burial Ground (Archaic Athens, Greece) Using Deciduous Dental Morphology.American journal of biological anthropology · 2026Article
- Homo luzonensis and the role of homoplasy in the morphology of hominin insular species.Cladistics : the international journal of the Willi Hennig Society · 2026Article
- Evaluating the accuracy of root transparency and periodontosis age estimation models in a Portuguese population.Forensic science, medicine, and pathology · 2025Article
- Biodistance Analysis via Dental Phenotypic Diversity in Early Collective Burials at Cerro Juan Díaz, Panamá (30-650 CE) [Análisis de Biodistancia Mediante la Diversidad Fenotípica Dental en los Entierros Colectivos Tempranos del Cerro Juan Díaz, Panamá (30-650 EC)].American journal of biological anthropology · 2025Article
- Human population dynamics in Upper Paleolithic Europe inferred from fossil dental phenotypes.Science advances · 2024Article
- Article
- A fresh perspective on infrared spectroscopy as a prescreening method for molecular and stable isotopes analyses on ancient human bones.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Evaluating predictions of the patterning cascade model of crown morphogenesis in the human lower mixed and permanent dentition.PloS one · 2024Article
- Article
- Dental size variation in admixed Latin Americans: Effects of age, sex and genomic ancestry.PloS one · 2023Article
- New insights on Celtic migration in Hungary and Italy through the analysis of non-metric dental traits.PloS one · 2023Article
- Patterns of variation in canal and root number in human post-canine teeth.Journal of anatomy · 2022Article
- Morphological variation of the deciduous second molars in the Baka Pygmies.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- A novel system for classifying tooth root phenotypes.PloS one · 2021Article
- Neutral evolution of human enamel-dentine junction morphology.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Testing the utility of dental morphological trait combinations for inferring human neutral genetic variation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Humans inherit the traits of their teeth.British dental journal · 2020Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Researchers commonly rely on human dental morphological features in order to reconstruct genetic affinities among past individuals and populations, particularly since teeth are often the best preserved part of a human skeleton. Tooth form is considered to be highly heritable and selectively neutral and, therefore, to be an excellent proxy for DNA when none is available. However, until today, it remains poorly understood whether certain dental traits or trait combinations preserve neutral genomic signatures to a greater degree than others. Here, we address this long-standing research gap by systematically testing the utility of 27 common dental traits and >134 million possible trait combinations in reflecting neutral genomic variation in a worldwide sample of modern human populations. Our analyses reveal that not all traits are equally well-suited for reconstructing population affinities. Whereas some traits largely reflect neutral variation and therefore evolved primarily as a result of genetic drift, others can be linked to nonstochastic processes such as natural selection or hominin admixture. We also demonstrate that reconstructions of population affinity based on many traits are not necessarily more reliable than those based on only a few traits. Importantly, we find a set of highly diagnostic trait combinations that preserve neutral genetic signals best (up to [Formula: see text]
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