Tales Teeth Tell: Development, Evolution, Behavior

"I have an incredible amount of respect for Professor Tanya Smith. She does research that is very like my own. She has done some incredible work, for instance, taking Neanderthal teeth into a synchrotron and zapping them with a hugely powerful laser beam to see inside and reconstruct the daily growth patterns of another human species that lived tens of thousands of years ago. Her research is super exciting and on the biting edge of what dental anthropology can do. Her book really takes an in-depth look at what we can learn about the past from teeth. Where Professor Ungar’s book is very concentrated on diet, Professor Smith’s book allows us to think about some of the issues of how we grew, how we fed and what these things tell us about life in the past. In addition, she writes quite personally about her own journey as a scientist, and her enthusiasm for the subject really comes through. I think that even if you aren’t obsessed with teeth, it’s a really nice book for people, particularly girls who might be interested in science, to see this journey of interest and excitement and to feel how fun it can be to do something as unlikely as dental anthropology. Well, one of the really fascinating things she has been able to do is to reconstruct the childhoods of different hominid species. In my own research, I’m very interested in childhood growth. So her work, looking at how long the Neanderthal children take to grow up has been really interesting in terms of suggesting—the jury’s still out—that Neanderthals may have grown ever so slightly quicker than modern humans. They might have had a slightly faster childhood than the long slow childhoods that got us to be who we are today. A lot of her work is on the methodological cutting edge. It’s explaining how we know these things. It’s pretty unlikely, if you think about it, that we could take a 50,000-year-old fossil and know exactly how it grew. Her work looks at how the tiny little fossil clock in our teeth can actually help us answer questions like that. She’s providing an insight into how evolutionary science is done and the kind of joy with which it can be done, which I think is very important."