Dental Morphology of Naia, a Late Pleistocene Human from Mexico and the Sinodont/Sundadont Issue

ABSTRACT

The dental morphology of the earliest Americans is poorly known, partly because existing data are largely unpublished and partly because dental wear is typically extreme in the few complete dentitions available. The remains of Naia, a 13,000–12,000 year-old young woman from Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, possess a complete dental record in perfect condition, offering the unique opportunity to record the dental morphology of an early Paleoindian and a chance to address the long-standing debate about whether these first people exhibited Sundadont or Sinodont dental morphology. As an individual, her dentition would fit comfortably in the Sinodont grouping. However, when she is included in the population of North American skeletal remains that can be confidently placed before ∼9000 years ago, a different pattern emerges. The Paleoindians fall neatly between the two dental patterns, suggesting that the founding North American population exhibits a dental pattern of its own, independent of its east Asian relatives.

KEYWORDS:

• Dental morphology
• Paleoindian
• late Pleistocene
• North America

Acknowledgements

Naia was recovered as part of Proyecto Arqueológico Subacuatico de Hoyo Negro, supported by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia of Mexico and the National Geographic Society. Analysis of Naia’s dental morphology was in part supported by CONACyT Ciencia Basica 2017–2018 grant number A1-S-10037 to the senior author. We are grateful to Alex Alvarez, Beto Nava, Roberto Chávez Arce, and Susan Bird for recovering the Naia cranium, Diana Arano for her conservation efforts, Dominique Rissolo for leading the 3-D documentation of this important site, and to current project leader Helena Barba Meineke. Leopoldo Ruiz and Dante Arteaga, both of the Universidad Autónoma de México, produced the CT scans used in this analysis. Thanks also to Chris Stojanowski for helping us with data procurement and to Bill Adams of Medvizi for assistance with CT scan manipulation. We are thankful to Alfredo Coppa for kindly sharing the dental morphological dataset for Warm Mineral Springs, and to G. Richard Scott for the helpful discussion on dental morphological traits and for sharing some of Turner’s data. We also thank David Navega and Joao Coehlo for the applying rASUDAS. This work is dedicated to the late Pilar Luna Erreguerena, longtime leader of the Hoyo Negro Project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by CONACyT: [Grant Number Ciencia Basica N. A1-S-10037].

Notes on contributors

Andrea Cucina

Andrea Cucina (PhD Catholic University School of Medicine, Rome, Italy 1998) is a member of the Mexican National System of Researchers Level III. His main interest is dental anthropology of archaeological and recent human populations; he is currently working mainly on population affinities and migratory dynamics in Mesoamerica. Dr Cucina has authored or co-authored more than eighty scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals and edited several scientific books.

Elma Maria Vega Lizama

Elma María Vega Lizama (PhD Autonomous University of Yucatán 2015) has been supervising research at UADY’s School of Odontology since 2015. She has published in national and international journals in the areas of odontology, particularly in the morphology and anatomy of root canals, and physical anthropology.

James C. Chatters

James C. Chatters (PhD University of Washington 1982) is an archaeologist and paleontologist who has published extensively on hunter-gatherer prehistory and paleoecology in western North America, paleoanthropology of the earliest human skeletons from North and Central America, cultural macroevolution, and late Quaternary mammalian paleontology. He has been involved in the recovery of and/or research on many of North America’s earliest human skeletons.