Performance analysis of deciduous morphology for detecting biological siblings

Area of Science:

• Paleoanthropology
• Bioarchaeology
• Forensic Anthropology

Background:

• Family-centered burial practices offer insights into social structures in ancient populations.
• Dental phenotypic traits are frequently used as proxies for genotypes to identify biological relatives in archaeological studies.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the efficacy of deciduous dental morphological traits in distinguishing sibling pairs from unrelated individuals within a single population.
• To assess the potential of using tooth morphology for kinship analysis in ancient skeletal remains.

Main Methods:

• Collected 46 deciduous dental morphological traits from 69 sibling pairs.
• Calculated inter-individual Euclidean distances using 20 selected traits.
• Employed bootstrap resampling and multidimensional scaling (MDS) to analyze phenotypic similarity and clustering among siblings.

Main Results:

• Sibling pairs exhibited significantly lower phenotypic distances (average 0.252) compared to non-relative pairs (P < 0.001).
• MDS plots revealed moderate to strong clustering among siblings, indicating familial resemblance.
• Families occupied a smaller proportion of the multidimensional space compared to the total sample.

Conclusions:

• Deciduous crown morphology is a reliable method for identifying related sibling pairs.
• Significant variation exists in phenotypic divergence among different families, highlighting the complexity of familial resemblance.