Kate McGrath

State University of New York College at Oneonta | SUNY Oneonta · Department of Anthropology

Neanderthals’ lives were historically portrayed as highly stressful, shaped by constant pressures to survive in harsh ecological conditions, thus potentially contributing to their extinction. Recent work has challenged this interpretation, leaving the issue of stress among Paleolithic populations highly contested and warranting in-depth examination...

Neanderthals’ lives historically portrayed as highly stressful, shaped by constant pressures to survive in harsh ecological conditions, thus potentially contributing to their extinction. Recent work has challenged this interpretation, leaving the issue of stress among Paleolithic populations highly contested and warranting in-depth examination. Her...

Extensive discourse surrounds the ethics of human skeletal research and curation, but there has yet to be a similar discussion of the treatment of great ape skeletal remains, despite the clear interest in their ethical treatment when alive. Here we trace the history of apes who were killed and collected for natural history museums during the early...

Physiological stress disrupts normal growth creating visible grooves on the enamel surface (i.e., linear enamel hypoplasia or LEH). Hypoplastic defects often, but not always, co-occur with internal accentuated lines (AL). Monkeys reportedly exhibit fewer enamel defects than hominoids as their presumably faster-growing teeth produce shallower LEH de...

Linear enamel hypoplasias (LEHs) are grooves on tooth crowns that form in response to developmental stressors such as malnutrition and disease. We studied LEH in the anterior teeth of two baboon species (Papio ursinus N=30; P. anubis N=15) hypothesized to be subjected to different stress levels. Using macrophotography, we scored LEH severity as mil...

Orangutans are endangered primates that live in Asian forests. Each year, these forests are becoming more stressful to live in because of habitat destruction and deforestation. The stress of habitat change may affect some orangutans more than others. As male orangutans age, some of them grow big cheek pads on their faces, called flanges (flanged ma...

Abstract: Stress events such as malnutrition and illness disrupt normal tooth growth creating grooves that are visible on the tooth surface (i.e., linear enamel hypoplasia or LEH). External LEH defects often co-occur with internal manifestations of stress called accentuated lines. However, it is unclear whether the two defect types always co-occur....

Abstract: Linear enamel hypoplasia (LEH) appears as horizontal grooves around the tooth crown, forming in response to stressors like malnutrition and disease. While LEH defects are very common and conspicuous in hominoids, they are less so in monkeys due to their faster tooth growth, creating often overlooked shallower defects. Here, we analyze the...

Mountain gorillas are particularly inbred compared to other gorillas and even the most inbred human populations. As mountain gorilla skeletal material accumulated during the 1970s, researchers noted their pronounced facial asymmetry and hypothesized that it reflects a population-wide chewing side preference. However, asymmetry has also been linked...

Extensive discourse exists on research ethics for living apes, but there has yet to be a forum for discussing the treatment of their remains from a reflexive perspective that integrates ethics, methodology, and theory construction. In this session, we will explore the tension between approaches that consider specimens only at the population or spec...

Objectives: We compared an early life stress indicator, linear enamel hypoplasia (LEH), in the canine teeth of two male orangutan (Pongo spp.) morphs. Flanged males have large bi-discoid cheek pads and a laryngeal throat pouch, and they exhibit either the same or higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol throughout development compared with unf...

Objectives Existing data on bonobo and chimpanzee dental eruption timing are derived predominantly from captive individuals or deceased wild individuals. However, recent advances in noninvasive photographic monitoring of living, wild apes have enabled researchers to characterize dental eruption in relatively healthy individuals under naturalistic c...

Early life stress disrupts growth and creates horizontal grooves on the tooth surface in humans and other mammals, yet there is no consensus for their quantitative analysis. Linear defects are considered to be nonspecific stress indicators, but evidence suggests that intermittent, severe stressors create deeper defects than chronic, low-level stres...

Existing data on bonobo and chimpanzee dental eruption timing are derived predominantly from captive individuals or deceased wild individuals. However, recent advances in noninvasive photographic monitoring of living, wild apes have greatly expanded our knowledge of chimpanzee dental eruption in relatively healthy individuals under naturalistic con...

Intra-tooth stable isotope variations have been used to interpret seasonality and aridity in paleoenvironmental reconstructions of paleontological and archeological sites. However, most intra-tooth datasets only permit qualitative interpretations of seasonality, because the measured signal is attenuated due to the duration of enamel mineralization...

Orangutans exhibit intrasex bimaturism, a trait rare among primates. Males exist in two morphs: flanged, with large bidiscoid cheek pads on their face and a laryngeal throat pouch, and unflanged, lacking secondary sexual characteristics and displaying “developmental arrest.” Flanged males in captivity are shown to have higher levels of testosterone...

Linear hypoplastic defects of enamel are horizontal grooves on the tooth surface, representing disruptions to enamel secretion in response to disturbances during development. Compared to permanent teeth, much less is known about hypoplastic defects in deciduous teeth. Localized hypoplasia of the primary canine (LHPC) has been described in hominoids...

Les dents sont l’un des matériaux les mieux préservés des assemblages archéologiques et paléoanthropologiques. Les tissus dentaires, tels que l'émail et la dentine, se forment par couches superposées qui seront préservées tout au long de la vie de l’individu. Cette séquence de couches contient l’enregistrement d'informations uniques sur de la traje...

Deeper or more 'severe' linear enamel hypoplasia (LEH) defects are hypothesized to reflect more severe stress during development, but it is not yet clear how depth is influenced by intrinsic enamel growth patterns. Recent work documented inter- and intraspecific differences in LEH defect depth in extant great apes, with mountain gorillas having sha...

Liang Bua, the type locality of Homo floresiensis, is a limestone cave located in the western part of the Indonesian island of Flores. The relatively continuous stratigraphic sequence of the site spans the past ~190 kyr and contains ~275,000 taxonomically identifiable vertebrate skeletal elements, ~80% of which belong to murine rodent taxa (i.e., r...

Linear enamel hypoplasia (LEH) appears as pronounced horizontal grooves on the outer surface of teeth. LEH defects are understood to represent episodes of nonspecific stress in early life, but little is known about their etiology in nonhuman primates. Researchers have suggested that more severe stressors result in deeper LEH defects, while others a...

Here, we analyze canine histologic sections from four great ape taxa (Gorilla beringei beringei, G. gorilla gorilla, Pan troglodytes, and Pongo sp.; N=41). We measure linear enamel thickness and the angle of internal growth increments as they meet the outer enamel surface (striae angles) in the midcrown region. If variation in canine growth pattern...

Objective: Linear enamel hypoplasia (LEH) is a condition marked by localized reductions in enamel thickness, resulting from growth disruptions during dental development. We use quantitative criteria to characterize the depth of LEH defects and “normal” perikymata in great apes. We test the hypothesis that mountain gorillas have shallow defects comp...

Here we describe a new method for the quantitative characterization of LEH defects. We test whether 1) mountain gorillas have shallower defects than other great ape taxa; 2) females have deeper defects than males in all taxa; and 3) if defect depth changes through time in wild mountain gorillas.

Objectives: While dental development is important to life history investigations, data from wild known-aged great apes are scarce. We report on the first radiographic examination of dental development in wild Virunga mountain gorillas, using known-age skeletal samples recovered in Rwanda. Materials and methods: In 43 individuals (0.0-14.94 years...

Here, we report LEH prevalence in wild Virunga mountain gorillas from Rwanda, derived from individuals that have died since the mid-1990s. Mountain gorillas exhibit higher LEH prevalence than previously reported (i.e. Guatelli-Steinberg et al., 2012), although the overall prevalence is lower than that of chimpanzees and orangutans. Male mountain go...

Experimental studies of hafting adhesives and modifications to compound tool components can demonstrate the extent to which human ancestors understood and exploited material properties only formally defined by science within the last century. Discoveries of Stone Age hafting adhesives at archaeological sites in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa h...