Blurred time resolution of tooth dentin serial sections

The growth of tooth dentin is incremental, so its formation represents a dietary record in early life. With archeological skeletons, applying sequential stable isotope analysis to the horizontal sections of tooth dentin has revealed weaning patterns and dietary changes that took place during childhood. However, the assignment of ages to dentin serial sections (DSSs) is problematic due to the changing extension rate and oblique growth layers of dentin, and these effects have not been quantified. This study presents a mathematical model for investigating the corresponding age range of the horizontal DSSs of human permanent incisors, canines, and molars.

Parameters describing the tooth dentin microstructure were taken from previous studies, and dentin growth patterns were modeled. The model was implemented as the R package MDSS.

The developed model shows that the true corresponding age of the sections differed by a few years on average from the estimated age with equal temporal divisions, that the model gave values extending across a wide range, and that these differences become large for sections formed at older ages. The stable isotope ratio of the sections presented an aggregate representation of possibly complex dietary changes across a few years, and dietary changes over short times, such as several months, could not be accurately reconstructed even when using a finer horizontal sectioning method.

These results demonstrate that DSSs correspond to an unexpectedly wider (i.e., three to four times) and different (i.e., -2 to 0.5 years on average) age range than previously assumed and that complicated patterns of dietary change blur in the isotopic trajectory of the sections. Alternative experimental methods, such as imaging-assisted oblique sampling, should be used to retrieve an accurate and precise sequential dietary record from tooth dentin.