The story of the search for precision in the delineation of human structure goes back to Blumenbach (1775), Linnaeus (1758), Buffon (1749) and their precursors; while Magnus Hundt used the word ‘Anthropology’ in 1501. There are those who would look to the inimitable Aristotle as our founding father - who applied the name ‘anthropologists’ to students of Man. Some of us, who may be biased by our links with medical science, would even stake a claim for Hippocrates (who had lived all but seven years of his life when Aristotle was born), for did not the ‘Father of Medicine’ leave us De Natura Hominis, a kind of primer of ecological anthropology?

The measure of man has thus a long and honourable history. Odontometry means the measurement of teeth and our records of its history are less well documented. Here, truly, is an archive waiting to be chronicled by some young and eager disciple who senses, however dimly, the fructifying force of the historical approach.

Yet even if its roots be less readily discernible, the modern flowering of odontometrics is one of the marvels of recent biological anthropology. It is not so many years ago, and certainly well within my lifetime, that people who measured hominid teeth, past and present, were considered a trifle eccentric. eccentric. They were looked at askance by their head-shaking colleagues who were inclined to ask: where are they heading? why are they collecting thousands of metrics with their carefully-sharpened vernier calipers and their tunnel vision?