350 smithsonian miscellaneous collections vol.83 



The Teeth of Early Man ' 



During the summer of 1923 and of 1927, the writer was able to 

 revisit the various European Institutions in which the more vakiable 

 skeletal remains of early man and fossil European apes are preserved, 

 and the occasions were utilized for careful reexamination and remea- 

 surement of the teeth of these remains, more particularly of the lower 

 •molars, new data on which have become of great importance since the 

 recent work on the Piltdown jaw. 



Measurements of the teeth of most of the remains of early man 

 and higher apes in Europe have been made and published before, 

 some by the present writer. But they were made by almost as many 

 different methods and instruments as individuals. Measurements of 

 teeth are, it is well known, in themselves extraordinarily difficult, in 

 addition to which there is no definite agreement as yet as to the 

 exact points from which to measure, or the precise manner of measur- 

 ing. As a result hardly any two separate measurements of the same 

 teeth, even by the same observer, give absolutely the same values, 

 and occasionally the differences are so marked that the student loses 

 confidence in the records. Nor is he helped by the casts of the various 

 specimens, for due to imperfections of technique and changes in 

 plaster these generally give results on which one can place no great 

 reliance. 



Yet there is a growing evidence that accurate measurements of the 

 teeth and particularly of the lower molars will be of signal value in 

 the studies of human evolution and variation. The teeth have changed 

 with time in their absolute as well as in their relative dimensions, 

 and they are evidently still changing. There is therefore an urgent 

 need of uniform data on all the important early material in this 

 line, data that could safely be used by every worker as basis for 

 comparison. 



To obtain such data as far as possible has been the writer's aim for 

 years ; but the effort would have been quite useless without the 

 formulation beforehand of a definite, uniform method of measure- 

 ment, and such a method was developed, as has already been de- 



' See Hrdlicka, A., New Data on the Teeth of Earlj' Man and Certain Fossil 

 European Apes. Anier. Journ. Phys. Anthrop., Vol. 7, No. i, 1924. The author 

 desires also in this place to call attention to the very good work on fossil teeth 

 of both man and apes carried on by William K. Gregory, Milo Hellman, and 

 Gerrit S. Miller, Jr. (see bibliography). 



