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Updated: Aug 8, 2026

Sampling and Pretreatment of Tooth Enamel Carbonate for Stable Carbon and Oxygen Isotope Analysis
Published on: August 15, 2018
Cladistic analysis of dental traits in recent humans using a fossil outgroup
C B Stringer1, L T Humphrey, T Compton
1Department of Palaeontology, Natural History Museum, London, U.K.
Abstract:
The relationships between a range of modern human samples are assessed from cladistic analyses of the published population frequencies of tooth crown characters, using new data on the Krapina Neanderthal sample as an outgroup. All of the most parsimonious trees show an early divergence of African and Australasian groups. This result is compared with an alternative dendrogram proposed by Turner (1992). Reconstruction of a hypothetical dental ancestor suggests that the similarities between the African and Australasian groups result from the retention of symplesiomorphous dental traits. Additionally, despite expectations from multiregional evolution, recent Europeans are dentally less like the Krapina Neanderthals than are Africans and Australians.
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