Dental News - Research uses dental plaque to uncover potential for insights into ancient diets

Dental Tribune UK

Fri. 20. July 2018

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YORK, UK: Perhaps unfairly, the teeth of Britons have developed an international reputation for being crooked and aesthetically subpar. Researchers have been able to put them to good use, however, as a recent study analysing using British teeth from the Iron Age has demonstrated the potential for using proteins in dental plaque deposits to uncover what our ancestors’ diets consisted of.

Identifying evidence of foods such as plant crops from ancient times can be a difficult process, since these foods rarely leave a trace in the archaeological record. Proteins from food, however, can survive in dental calculus for thousands of years, with milk proteins previously shown to be preserved in archaeologically discovered calculus. The international study, led by researchers at the University of York and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena in Germany, has proven that this dental calculus can also be used to unlock further information about a wider range of food proteins, including plant-sourced types.

Senior author Dr Camilla Speller, from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, emphasised how this discovery could aid understanding of the diets and lifestyles of our ancestors. “This approach may be particularly useful in the detection of understudied vegetative crops, especially in regions where macro-botanical remains are not preserved,” she said.

“It may offer a more precise way of identifying foodstuffs compared to other methods such as ancient DNA and isotope analysis as it can distinguish between different crops and indicate whether people were consuming dairy products, like milk or cheese,” she continued.

“In the teeth we look at from individuals who lived around the Victorian era we identified proteins related to plant foods, including oats, peas and vegetables in the cabbage family. Occasionally, we find evidence of milk and oats in the same mouth—I like to think it’s from eating porridge!”

First author Dr Jessica Hendy, from the Department of Archaeology at the Max Planck Institute, added: “While there is still a lot we don’t know, this is exciting because it shows that archaeological dental calculus harbours dietary information, including food products that ordinarily do not survive in archaeological sites.”

The study, titled “Proteomic evidence of dietary sources in ancient dental calculus”, was published online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B on 18 July 2018.

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