Dental tissues contain remarkably faithful records of their development through time, best represented by daily incremental features in enamel and dentine. These have been used to determine the rate and duration of tooth formation, disruptions during development, and age at death in juvenile hominins. Syntheses of microscopic tooth growth and chemistry allow complementary insights into early life diets, developmental stress, neurotoxicant exposure, and environmental change. Our recent work on human children and captive primates of known nursing and health histories has enabled a new understanding of nursing behaviour in wild primates, as well as weaning ages and even childhood lead exposures in Neanderthals. Professor Smith’s ongoing worldwide survey of teeth from human children over the Holocene is revealing remarkable behavioural, developmental, and environmental diversity that points to a remarkable degree of resilience and adaptability in Earth’s last remaining hominin species.

Professor Tanya M. Smith (Griffith University) is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, and a member of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution and the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Change. She has previously held a professorship at Harvard University and fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.