915 / Teeth tell stories that mouth can’t

A fossil tooth could be a buffet of information for researchers at a dig. Teeth grow like trees in a sense. They add layer after layer of enamel and dentine tissues every day. And so they can help us reconstruct the biological events that individuals or even communities have undergone during their early years of life.

Among other things, teeth preserve “precise temporal changes and chemical records of key elements” involved in what and how we eat. Recently, Dr Renaud Joannes-Boyau and team used specialized laser sampling techniques to vaporize microscopic portions on the surface of teeth from Australopithecus africanus fossils. Their finding is the first direct evidence of maternal roles of one of our earliest ancestors.

Those ancestral mothers, who lived from about two-to-three million years ago, breastfed their infants continuously — from birth to about one year of age. Nursing appears to follow in a cyclical pattern in the early years for infants. Mothers had to supplement solid food intake with breast milk when resources were scarce. This makes us rethink on the social organizations of our ancestors.

SNEAK PEEKQUIZ No. 915

1. Elephants save slow-growing trees having a strong ‘carbon backbone’. Who said it?

– Stephen Blake
– Sigurd Ferdinand Olson
– Stewart Lee Udall

1. Stephen Blake

2. Talking of microbes, who suggested that “too clean is not necessarily a good thing”?

– Selman A. Waksman
– Howard Walter Florey
– Zhongtang Yu

2. Zhongtang Yu

3. Who argued that men with large upper-bodies in politics share Stone Age intuitions?

– Cynthia Enloe
– Michael Bang Petersen
– Susan L. Woodward

3. Michael Bang Petersen

4. Which psychologist developed a preferential voting system that is named after him?

– Baruch Fischhoff
– Clyde Hamilton Coombs
– Robyn Mason Dawes

4. Clyde Hamilton Coombs

5. Which artist applied gold leaf to paintings during the height of his “Golden Period”?

– Gustav Klimt
– Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler
– Susan Rothenberg

5. Gustav Klimt