What big teeth they have: Rethinking mandibular tooth crowding in domestic dogs and wolves using landmark-based metric analysis

Summary

Tooth crowding is one of several criteria used for the identification of domestic animals in archaeological contexts, and is used frequently in dog domestication studies to support claims of early Palaeolithic domesticates. Studies of crowding have varied in their quantitative approaches, and can be improved by more robust statistical testing and the incorporation of more specimens with secure wild or domestic identifications. Here we present a landmark-based method for analyzing tooth crowding, along with a statistical framework for describing crowding between populations. Our method expands on traditional metrics used to quantify crowding and is applied to a large dataset of modern dogs, modern wolves, and Late Pleistocene wolves to examine the prevalence of tooth crowding in these populations.

Results show that both modern and Pleistocene wolf specimens exhibit more mandibular crowding than domestic dogs. This contradicts generally accepted assumptions regarding the nature of tooth crowding in dogs, and domestication in general, though future studies should specifically target archaeological material to investigate crowding within distinct archaeological populations. This shows that landmark-based methods offer powerful tools for recording and analyzing tooth crowding, and that assumptions surrounding tooth crowding in the identification of archaeological canids and other mammals should be critically re-examined.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Rethinking Methods of Faunal Analysis   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14860