Paleolithic Child’s Teeth Reexamined

PARIS, FRANCE—IFL Science reports that Jérôme Isle de Beauchaine of France’s National Natural History Museum and his colleagues analyzed 30,000-year-old teeth discovered in southwestern France in the mid-twentieth century. It had been previously suggested that these teeth from Les Rois Cave belonged to a Neanderthal child butchered by Paleolithic modern humans, who then wore the teeth as a necklace. But the new evaluation determined that the incisors are not “shovel shaped,” as is characteristic of Neanderthal incisors, and the enamel is much thicker than that usually found in Neanderthal teeth. Rather, the incisors feature a “flat labial surface,” a typical feature of modern human incisors, and the thickness of the tooth enamel falls within the normal modern human range. The teeth do have some Neanderthal characteristics, however, and may reflect a mosaic of ancient and modern traits in Paleolithic humans. Isle de Beauchaine concluded that all of the human bones that have been unearthed at Les Rois are the remains of modern humans. Wearing the teeth of the deceased as jewelry may have been a funerary tradition, he speculated. Read the original scholarly article about this research in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology. To read more about hominin dentition, go to "Consider the Craniums."