When only one tooth survives from a 9,000-year-old child, the questions that can be asked are limited to what that tooth can reveal.

What the tooth revealed was, given these constraints, remarkable.

Age, sex, ancestry, and a direct radiocarbon date — four major categories of information from a single small specimen.

The analytical power of modern methods, applied to adequate material even when that material is minimal, is one of the genuinely extraordinary achievements of twenty-first-century archaeology.

The Dental Morphology and What It Observed

Beyond the genetic and dating analysis, the Trail Creek tooth was the subject of detailed dental anthropological study — the morphological and metric analysis that characterized the physical structure of the tooth in detail and placed it within the broader context of human dental variation.