Forensic practitioners and anthropologists will be among those to benefit from new University of Kent research on the dental development of humans.
The research, which was conducted by Dr Patrick Mahoney at the University’s School of Anthropology and Conservation and published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, has established links between tooth eruption and enamel growth in human infants, concluding that milk teeth do not develop in the same way as adult permanent teeth. Such a discovery not only opens up a new way of assessing the dental development of humans through fossils but will also assist in age-at-death determinations in forensic situations.