Ancient Teeth With Neanderthal Features Reveal New Chapters of Human Evolution

The 450,000-year-old teeth, discovered on the Italian Peninsula, are helping anthropologists piece together the hominid family tree

By Brian Handwerk
smithsonian.com
October 3, 2018 3:48PM

Crime-drama fans know that forensic scientists can ID the remains of long-missing persons by examining their teeth. To solve even more ancient mysteries, anthropologists use the same kind of cutting-edge tooth technology, and a European team may have cracked a very cold case indeed—one that’s almost half a million years in the making.

A fossil tooth study published today in the journal PLOS ONE analyzes some of the oldest human remains ever found on the Italian Peninsula. The teeth, which are some 450,000 years old, have some telltale features of the Neanderthal lineage of ancient humans. Dating back to the Middle Pleistocene, the fossils help to fill in gaps in an intriguingly complex part of the hominid family tree.

The species Homo neanderthalensis shares an unknown common ancestor with our own species, Homo sapiens, but it’s unclear exactly when the lineages diverged. Homo sapiens evolved perhaps 300,000 years ago, according to the fossil record, while Neanderthals’ evolutionary timeline has proven even trickier to pin down. Some genetic studies suggest that their lineage split from our own as long as 650,000 years ago, but the oldest definitive fossil evidence for Neanderthals extends back only about 400,000 years.

To help to take a bite out of that gap, Clément Zanolli of the Université Toulouse III and colleagues used detailed morphological analyses and micro-CT scanning techniques to painstakingly measure the 450,000-year-old teeth. The teeth were then compared, inside and out, to those of other ancient human species, revealing that they have Neanderthal-like features.

Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ancient-teeth-neanderthal-features-reveal-chapters-human-evolution-180970460/#ZrOKZSLKGcDF3GQS.99