Dental Cementum in Anthropology

Stephan Naji is a bioarchaeologist specializing in paleodemography, particularly in demographic and health transitions. His current research focuses on optimizing cementochronology within the broader evolutionary context of chronobiology for histological and virtual age-at-death estimation. He also actively promotes life-history events identification and modeling in cementum through interdisciplinary collaborations. William Rendu is a zooarchaeologist interested in the mobility of past human societies. He implemented cementochronology during his Ph.D. to discuss the seasonal distribution of Neanderthal activities. He is now continuing this work with a larger chronological framework as director of the International Research Laboratory ZooSCAn in Siberia. Lionel Gourichon is a zooarchaeologist. His research interest lies in the emergence of food production in Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean area, in particular on human-animal relationships and the process of domestication. He actively contributes to methodological advances in bioarchaeology to improve the study of mammal and bird remains.

Part 1. The Biology of Cementum; Introduction: Cementochronology in chronobiology; 1. A brief history of cemental annuli research, with emphasis upon Anthropological applications; 2. Development and structure of cementum; 3. Insights into Cementogenesis from human disease and genetically engineered mouse models; 4. A comparative genetic analysis of acellular cementum; 5. Pattern of human cementum deposition with a special emphasis on hypercementosis; 6. Recent advances on acellular cementum increments composition using synchrotron x-radiation; 7. Incremental elemental distribution in chimpanzee cellular cementum: insights from synchrotron x-ray fluorescence and implications for life history inferences; 8. Identifying life-history events in dental cementum, a literature review; Part II. Protocols; 9. Cementochronology for archaeologists. Experiments and testing for an optimized thin section preparation protocol; 10. Optimizing preparation protocols and microscopy for Cementochronology; 11. Cementochronology protocol for selecting a region of interest in zooarchaeology; 12. Tooth cementum annulations method for determining age-at-death using modern deciduous human teeth: challenges and lessons learned; 13. The analysis of tooth cementum for the histological determination of age and season at death on teeth of us active duty military members; 14. Preliminary protocol to identify parturitions lines in acellular cementum; 15. Toward the non-destructive imaging of cementum annulations using synchrotron x-ray microtomography; 16. Non-invasive 3d methods for the study of dental cementum; Part III. Applications; 17. Using Cementochronology to discuss the organization of past Neanderthal societies; 18. Investigating seasonal competition between hominins and cave hyaenas in the belgian ardennes during the late pleistocene: insights from cementum analyses; 19. Cementochronology to the rescue: osteobiography of a middle woodland woman with a combined skeletal dysplasia; 20. Estimating a mortality profile of fisher-gatherers in Brazil using Cementochronology; 21. Cementochronology: a solution to reconstructing past populations' mortality profiles using individual age-at-death estimates; 22. Assessing age-related mortality at petra, jordan using Cementochronology and hazard modeling; 23. Shaping age at death distributions by applying tooth cementum analysis to the early medieval graveyard of lauchheim (Germany); 24. Back to the root: the coming of age of Cementochronology; Index.