Enamel nanocrystal misorientation increased with meat-eating and agriculture
Pupa U P A Gilbert, Daniel R Green, Patrick Mahoney, Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg, W Scott McGraw, Emma Lagan, Fredrick Kyalo Manthi, Samuel Muteti, Emmanuel Ndiema, Fernando Ramirez Rozzi, Cayla A Stifler, Connor A Schmidt, Barat Q Achinuq, Andreas Scholl, Benjamin Gilbert, Mackie C O’Hara · 2026
Read Enamel nanocrystal misorientation increased with meat-eating and agriculture by Pupa U P A Gilbert, Daniel R Green, Patrick Mahoney, Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg, W Scott McGraw, Emma Lagan, Fredrick Kyalo Manthi, Samuel Muteti, Emmanuel Ndiema, Fernando Ramirez Rozzi, Cayla A Stifler, Connor A Schmidt, Barat Q Achinuq, Andreas Scholl, Benjamin Gilbert, Mackie C O’Hara (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13233625.txt.
Description
Pupa U P A Gilbert and colleagues released a 2026 study of tooth enamel at the nanoscale across primate evolution. Enamel is built from thin hydroxyapatite crystals bundled into rods, and the slight angular mismatch between neighboring crystals was poorly understood. Using an imaging method called PELICAN, the team measured crystal orientation in twelve teeth from nine primate species spanning about eighteen million years.
Mismatch between adjacent crystals grew as food got harder in apes and monkeys, past and present. In the human line, mismatch rose over the past 1.6 million years, especially when meat eating and stone-ground grain entered the diet, but not with industrial food processing. The authors suggest small misorientation angles help enamel resist cracks, a trick materials designers could borrow.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Pupa U P A Gilbert, Daniel R Green, Patrick Mahoney, Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg, W Scott McGraw, Emma Lagan, Fredrick Kyalo Manthi, Samuel Muteti, Emmanuel Ndiema, Fernando Ramirez Rozzi, Cayla A Stifler, Connor A Schmidt, Barat Q Achinuq, Andreas Scholl, Benjamin Gilbert, Mackie C O’Hara |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 64 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |