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Hello. My name is Tim Bromage.
And I'm here to present a lecture on Hard Tissue Biology in Human Health and Evolution.
0:09
There are several aspects of hard tissue biology within
the health sciences that have also been
the explicit focus of attention in the human evolutionary sciences.
These include enamel and tooth biology,
bone biology, craniofacial biology,
and life history and chronobiology.
In this presentation, we will focus on the first two subjects,
enamel biology and bone biology.
In the presentations that follow,
craniofacial biology and life history and chronobiology will be examined.
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It will be useful if from the outset,
we describe something of the difference between osteology and hard tissue biology.
An osteologist whose interest say,
"Lay in the adaptations to bipedalism or walking on two legs," would for instance,
look at the curvature of the spine,
the shape of the rib cage,
and the angle at which the thighbone approaches the lower leg,
and compare these features with,
for example, the same regions of a chimpanzee skeleton.
This comparison would reveal
the functional morphological differences
between the two skeletons and it would help to explain why it is
that a human walks well on two legs while a chimpanzee is more appropriately
adapted to knuckle walk using all four limbs in terrestrial locomotion.
Hard tissue biology takes a very different approach but one which is complementary,
in which we look into the tissues themselves
for describing aspects of organismal biology.
The first subject will be enamel biology.
1:40
The dentition of most mammals begins with
the formation and eruption into the mouth of the deciduous teeth.
This is followed in succession by the formation of permanent teeth in crypts in the jaws,
which will eventually grow and erupt into the mouth replacing the deciduous teeth.
Teeth of two parts.
They have a crown and they have a root.
The crown is exposed in the oral cavity and is
composed of enamel under which there is dentine,
which also forms the entirety of the root which anchors the tooth in the jaw.
