Dental Anthropology in deciphering the ancestral background: A practical approach

Abstract

The dental-facial complex is made up of three different types of tissues: skeletal tissues, soti tissues, and dental tissues. The components of the dental tissues like enamel, dentine, cementum, pulp, and gingiva have significant contributions to forensic science and thus have led to the evolution of a branch called ‘Forensic Odontology’. The dental tissues, the tooth, and dentine on as a whole are also well demonstrated in forensic odontology domains like age estimation, human identification, sex identification, ancestry or ethnicity determination, bitemark analysis, crime scene investigations, etc. As there is a strong genetic influence on tooth development and tooth morphology, dental traits may be used as a proxy for genetic materials. The expression of dental traits in a population is usually expressed in terms of frequencies. A huge database of dental traits’ frequencies from different biogeographical clusters is available in the scientific literature. They are being used as reference data for comparison in dental anthropology studies. The present article highlights the role of dental non-metric traits in ancestry determination. A practical step-by-step approach to use the rASUDAS web-based application to assess the ancestry using dental traits is described here.