Cusp of Cara-what?

Well, here I am again. Yeah, I know it seems like I might be using this blog as a way to procrastinate my work, but I like to say my storm of posts is because of my previous months of neglect...of the three people (including my dad) who read this silly, narcissistic thing. : )

At least this time, I can share some fun knowledge. I'm working on my third case for my forensics class, sad this time because its a little baby. And for obvious reasons little kids are difficult to figure out for a couple of reasons. Small children are essentially the same sex-wise. This is because they haven't gone through puberty, which brings on the hormonal changes that instigate the muscular and skeletal changes that give indicators of male/female-ness.

I do use the word 'sex' here because we are talking about someone's sex which is a biological reference and not their gender, which is a cultural creation. 'Gender' goes beyond male and female - it gives social cues to indicate proper behavior and roles. 'Sex' is just about the plumbing.

So I can't figure out if its a boy or a girl, but aging is a lot easier in kids. This is because the timing of growth, while slightly variable between different populations, is pretty standard within populations. You can figure this out based on the formation and eruption of teeth and the amount of growth of skeletal elements.

Another element of information you are generally looking at forensically is ancestry. Now some anthropologists thing ancestry is essentially racist and it has been used in that vein in the past. But I am of the school that thinks trying to figure out the general places of a person's geographic history is only helpful in identifying this person. Further, some things, like estimating a person's stature, are group specific. I can't use equations that estimate height for a person of European descent and expect them to work for someone who was of Asian descent. So I think its fine to figure out ancestry. We are all the same species, but because our descent groups moved around, settled in certain places and adapted, we all look a little different. The funny thing is, while we Americans think of ourselves as mutts from whatever conglomeration of home countries, we actually are creating our own phenotype. There is an 'American' skeletal type. European Americans do not look like Europeans and the same goes for African Americans. There has been so much admixture between people from different countries that we are both culturally and skeletally American.

So when figuring out ancestry, there are certain traits that can point towards a certain broad geographic group. One I thought I saw was a Carabelli's Cusp. It is an extra cusp found on the molars of the maxilla (your top row of teeth) on the side facing the inside of your mouth. Go ahead and poke around with your tongue, if you feel an extra little bump on the side of your tooth, generally above the biting surface, you may have one. Ask your dentist the next time you go.



This trait is found in people of European descent among other groups. Prehistoric Japanese skeletons (Jamon period) have been found to have it in pretty high frequencies, too.

Well, I needed to make sure carabelli's was what I was looking at (it wasn't), so I googled this trait to figure out what it would look like in an infant. But I was surprised that the third return on my Internet search was a message board on a white supremacist website. Just as an FYI Google, you can ignore any hate group website returns when I surf the web. I don't care if they have the exact answer for what I'm looking for, it's ok, I'll find it some other way.

But what started this whole post was that I found myself reading this message board - yeah, I might be on some govt list now because I clicked over, I just wanted to know what they were saying about some random dental trait. I mean why would anyone besides anthro kids care? What they were discussing was that the carabelli's cusp can be used as an ancestry trait. And they saw it as proving their white-ness (see: questionable 'awesome superiority-ness').

So this does prove the point that ancestry can be used in a racist and discriminatory way. I see that. But lets look at it this way, anything can be used in a good v bad way. Cars, guns, superpowers. Ancestry skeletal studies are a tool that can help better understand our population similarities and differences, trace population movement, and identify skeletonized forensic cases. It's important and just because some people want to choose a few traits and say it shows how great they are, well, someone will always say they have 'stars on thars', it doesn't make them right.

But there were some inaccuracies in the few posts I read that I feel compelled, as an anthropologist and supporter of ethical ancestry skeletal studies, to clear up. They won't read this, it's silly to even get worked up about, but it's my blog and I can rant if I want to. ; )

The carabelli's cusp is found in higher percentages among groups of European ancestry, but it's also found in pretty high frequencies among Asian and Australian aboriginal groups. Not to mention the fact that, while not seen often, is found in African groups.

So congratulations, skinheads, you could be white! Or you could be something else entirely. Welcome to the wonderful world of tens of thousands of years of human migration and admixture. We really have no idea who our ancestors were sleeping with, just general ideas. My people are Irish (among other things), but they weren't always in Ireland.