How old is this tooth?

Abstract

Human teeth are commonly found at archaeological sites and can be used to establish time milestones through various dating methods. Among these methods, stands out the method based on electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy (EPR) which allows the dating of samples aged over 50 thousand years and without collagen. The purpose of this study was analyze the literature on how the age of teeth is determined using the RPE spectroscopy dating method. This is an integrative literature review carried out in three databases (Lilacs, Medline and CAPES) using DeCS/MeSH descriptors and some inclusion criteria. From the hundreds of works found, between experimental and theoretical, 18 works were selected and analyzed, with the majority of these works written in English. Although it is a little-known subject within odontology, the determination of age by teeth is a possible field of action for the dentist. In the last decades, RPE spectroscopy has been successfully applied to date human teeth samples in several archaeological researches, helping to clarify questions about the dynamics of occupation, interspecific interactions and extinction of several human species that inhabited the Earth in the last hundreds of thousands of years.