Primate dental topographic analysisand functional morphology

摘要

Researchers often use tooth form/function relationships in living primates toreconstruct the diets of early hominins and other fossil primates. One relativelynew approach that has become an important tool for dental anthropologists isdental topographic analysis (see Teaford and Ungar, 2006; Ungar, 2006, 2007;Ungar and Daegling, 2007 for recent reviews). In this chapter, we summarizebriefly this approach in the context of earlier studies of primate dental functionalmorphology, and present some new data to illustrate how dental topographicanalysis works.