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The Dentition of the Hofmeyr Skull

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Hofmeyr

Part of the book series: Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology ((VERT))

Abstract

The Hofmeyr skull provides a rare representation of the dentition in sub-Saharan Africa from MIS 3. Aspects of the teeth demonstrate this individual’s close morphological and morphometric ties to South African Holocene and Late Pleistocene dentitions. Dental variation, particularly as it relates to size, is quite broad within the South African context. The Hofmeyr molars reside at the extreme range of morphometric variation observed in Holocene Khoesan dentitions, and find similitude with other large-crowned individuals from the southern and eastern regions of South Africa. A number of non-metrical trait commonalities are observed between the Hofmeyr and South African Khoesan teeth. While only a few of the traits that comprise the “Sub-Saharan African Dental Complex” (SSADC) could be scored for Hofmeyr, a midline diastema, a 3-rooted M2 and a M3 metaconule represent traits also observed in high frequencies among South African Holocene individuals. Additionally, several high frequency traits from the SSADC are observed in the Hofmeyr dentition, but the disparate frequencies among a number of populations that comprise this model in some of the variants (e.g., the Y occlusal pattern on the M2 and the presence of 5 cusps on the M3) make application of the SSADC to the South African dental map problematic.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Kevin Cole, East London Museum for facilitating our study of the dentition of the Hofmeyr skull, and we thank Alan G. Morris for providing the original photographs of the specimen taken by A.R. Hughes. We are grateful to the Archaeology Unit at Iziko Museums of South Africa; the Florisbad Quaternary Research Centre, National Museums of Bloemfontein; the Department of Human Biology, University of Cape Town; the Albany Museum, Grahamstown, and the Evolutionary Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg for access to dental material. We thank Justin Pargeter and Jason Lewis for fruitful discussions relating to the emergence of the LSA in southern and eastern Africa. We thank Carrie S. Mongle for assistance with the micro-CT scans and Luci Betti-Nash for the figures. We are grateful to Lesley Harrington and Lucas Delezene for constructive comments on the manuscript, which have served to substantially improve this contribution.

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  1. Department of Archaeology, Iziko Museums of South Africa, 25 Queen Victoria Street, Cape Town, 8001, South Africa

    Wendy Black

  2. Department of Anthropology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, 11794-4364, USA

    Frederick E. Grine

  3. Department of Anatomical Sciences, Stony Brook University School of Medicine, Stony Brook, NY, USA

    Frederick E. Grine

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    Frederick E. Grine

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Black, W., Grine, F.E. (2022). The Dentition of the Hofmeyr Skull. In: Grine, F.E. (eds) Hofmeyr. Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07426-4_12

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