University of Arkansas Dives Into Human Origins — Teeth First
While paleontologists study dinosaur bones, Dr. Peter S. Ungar has spent his life studying a different kind of fossil — teeth.
These “ready-made fossils,” as Dr. Ungar calls them, can help educate us on how the human diet has evolved over time. And since 1995, he and a handful of graduate and undergraduate students have continued to study these changes in the Ungar Lab at the University of Arkansas.
Honored as a 2018 SEC Faculty Achievement Award recipient, Dr. Ungar, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Environmental Dynamics Program at the University of Arkansas, is a paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist. He found his way to Razorback country after serving as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Cell Biology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, then as a research associate in the Department of Biological Anthropology and Anatomy at the Duke University Medical Center.
So, how and why were our ancestors’ teeth so different from ours? The answer to that question is not a simple one. In fact, it’s not even just one answer– there are a combination of factors.
“Teeth,” Dr. Ungar says, “are ready-made fossils.” They contain what he calls “foodprints.” Dr. Ungar’s book, Evolution’s Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins, describes foodprints as “distinctive patterns of microscopic wear and tear.” He goes on to explain, “They provide telltale details about what their owner actually ate in the past. These clues, combined with groundbreaking research in paleoclimatology, show how a changing climate altered the food options available to human ancestors. When the diet changed, the species changed, and we can trace how that diet and an unpredictable climate determined who among our ancestors was winnowed out and who survived.”
The answer isn’t even solely related to the study of teeth. To figure out how and why our pearly whites are the way they are, Dr. Ungar’s research is focused on dental anthropology (especially the study of relationships between diet and the sizes, shapes, and wear of teeth in living primates), primate feeding ecology (the study of the diets and feeding adaptations of living primates) and paleoanthropology (the study of fossil human ancestors and our close relatives).
Most of us don’t give our teeth much thought. They’re teeth. Though they’re in plain sight, they’re almost an invisible part of our daily lives — a part many of us take for granted until a problem pops up. But in reality, our teeth mean more than you ever imagined. They hold so much of our story — both our personal stories and the story of mankind. They really are, in Dr. Ungar’s words, “a legacy of our evolution — one that connects us all to our distant ancestors and to each other.”
So if you really want to know why our teeth these days are so high-maintenance, start digging into any one of the more than 175 scientific works Dr. Ungar has written or co-authored on the subject. Clearly, It Just Means More than teeth to Dr. Ungar and his students at the University of Arkansas. It means more understanding of how and why today’s teeth came to be, and more reminders that with us we carry a very real connection to our ancestors.
