As the first in her family to attend college, Tanya Smith went to SUNY Geneseo to study biology in hopes of following the paths of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, observing African mountain gorillas in the wild. Instead, she became fascinated by microscopy and the human history it revealed when fossilized teeth were imaged. The Tales Teeth Tell is a first-person account of her work as an associate professor at Harvard and at the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution at Griffin University in Brisbane. She offers a fascinating history of dental paleoanthropology and the role of teeth in human evolution. As she notes: "Not to knock rings in trees... but there is far more to discover inside our own mouths."
Filled with illustrations, charts, graphs and photographs, Smith's first book could easily have turned into one of those dry academic research papers that only other researchers read. But she is having none of that. The Tales Teeth Tell is an accessible, personal, often funny and occasionally controversial look into the murk of human evolution. Like Hope Jahren's recent highly lauded memoir Lab Girl, it at times drifts off-piste into cultural folklore, such as the "tooth fairy," "long in the tooth" and "gain a child, lose a tooth." She wanders into discussions of primates' use of toothpicks, tooth fossil evidence about the real "paleo" diet, the background of early tooth decoration with jewel implants and blackening, and the nascent experimentation in stem cell bioengineering of replacement teeth.
The Tales Teeth Tell is chock full of fascinating science, but it's also the personal story of a woman of science immersed in her work. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.