What Ancient Dental Calculus Reveals: Microfossils, DNA, and Proteins as Windows on Human Diet, Health, and Environment
Ancient dental calculus, hardened plaque on teeth, serves as a unique fossilized record preserving microfossils, DNA, and proteins. These components offer rich insights into ancient human diet, health, disease, and environment, complementing traditional archaeological evidence.
Ancient dental calculus—hardened plaque on teeth—is the only part of the body that fossilizes during life, and it turns out to be one of archaeology's richest records . As Christina Warinner, a biomolecular archaeologist at Harvard and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who helped pioneer the field, has explained, these crusty deposits preserve genetic material so well that they can reveal what people ate, what diseases they battled, and even what kinds of work they might have done. Calculus preserves three broad categories of evidence—microfossils, DNA, and proteins—each telling a distinct story about diet, health, and environment that bones and stone tools cannot. Ancient Dental Calculus: A Unique Window into Human History Dental calculus is a calcified form of tooth plaque that builds up on living teeth, mineralizing in layers as a person goes about their daily life. According to a review in the British Dental Journal , authored by J. Li, it serves as a…
