You can now tell if an ancient skeleton was male or female just by looking at the proteins stuck in their teeth.
March 25, 2026
Original Paper
Beyond dairy: Identification of dental enamel proteins in ancient human dental calculus
bioRxiv · 10.64898/2026.03.21.713223
The Takeaway
Ancient history research usually relies on finding intact DNA, which is fragile and degrades rapidly. This study discovered that tooth enamel proteins are consistently trapped and preserved inside hardened plaque (tartar), providing a robust way to identify the sex of skeletal remains from thousands of years ago.
From the abstract
Ancient human dental calculus is one of the richest archives of archaeological biomolecular information, providing direct evidence of diet, oral health, and the oral microbiome. Proteomic analyses of this biological matrix have so far focused mainly on oral microbes and dietary proteins, with milk proteins such as beta-lactoglobulin (BLG) providing the largest corpus of proteomic evidence. Despite the close relation between the various stages of dental calculus formation and mineralization with