Further observations on a method for estimating hominoid dental developmental patterns.

Several recent studies have concluded that early hominines resembled apes in patterns of dental ontogeny and have inferred from this conclusion that they were ape-like in other aspects of growth and development as well. Prior to their employment on fossil juveniles, the comparative methods used in these studies were not first tested for their predictive accuracy in distinguishing modern humans from apes on the basis of proposed patterns of dental ontogeny. We find that 92% of a sample of 48 modern children are classified as ape-like or nonhuman by the criteria employed in one of these studies and overlap entirely with fossil juvenile dental patterns. The use of these methods to characterize early hominines as "ape-like" or distinctly divergent from humans is thus shown to be unwarranted.