Teeth shapes are a useful tool to identify the fossil remains of hominins. Neanderthals, Homo erectus, and modern humans have distinct teeth shapes (mass, multiple roots, shoveling, cusps, protrusions). Even people living in different continents have specific teeth shapes.
Dental Shoveling
One type of tooth shape is known as dental shoveling, where the front teet, known as incisors, instead of being flat on their inner side, are shoveled. This type of shoveled teeth has been observed in monkeys such as macaques, baboons, and gibbons. It is also found in contemporary and ancient humans, as well as hominins.
Hominins with shoveled incisors
Our hominin ancestors also displayed shoveled incisors: it has been found in ancient remains of Australopithecus, Homo erectus, and the fossils from Dmanisi, Georgia and Atapuerca in Spain (Homo georgicus and Homo antecessor). More recent, yet ancient specimens include Neanderthals ad of course, remains of Homo sapiens (Denton, 2011; Margvelashvili, 2008).
Shoveled incisors in contemporary populations
Among our lineage, Homo sapiens, modern humans, shoveling is found at vry higher frequencies in East Asians (Japanese, Chinese, Mongolians, Northeastern Siberians) and populations that originated in Northeast Asia like the Eskimos and North American Native Americans, and the South American natives who replaced the older, ancestral Paleo Indians in that part of the Americas. Surprisingly, the Khoisan in Southern Africa have shoveled teeth.
Other ethnic groups have very low frequencies or absence of shoveled teeth: the paleo-Indians in South America, South and South Eastern Asians, Melanesians, Europeans, Arabian and Middle East populations, North Africans, central Africans, Eastern Africans.
Below is an image showing a normal, and a shoveled tooth (from Benton), it cleary shows the difference in incissor shape due to shoveling.
A table with frequency of shoveling, and source
- 100% (Source) Mongolia
- 100% (Source) China
- 64.7% (Source) Ainu, Sakhalin
- 93.4 % (Source) Japan, Tokyo
- 23.8 % (Source) Tajik, Afganistan
- 6 % (Source) Philippines
- 87.3 % (Source) Polynesian, Easter Island
- 60-90 % (Source) Australian Aboriginal
- 73% (Source) Melanesian
- 98.3% (Source) Pima Native Americans
- 100 % (Source) Yanomana Native Americans, Amazonia Brazil, Venezuela
- 100% (Source) Northwest Argentina (Amerind, mestizo)
- 90.1 % (Source) Precolumbian Peru
- 49.5 % (Source) Lapps in Finland
- 9.4% (Source) England
- 20.1% (Source) Denmark
- 40.2 % (Source) Germany
- 10.3 % (Source) Uganda
- 24 % (Source) Egypt
- 20 (Source) Sudan
- 31.2 % (Source) Punjab, Pakistan
- 22 % (Source) Odisha, East Central India
- 15 % (Source) Kerala, Southern India
- 95.5 % (Source) Mysuru, Southern India
- 8 % (Source) Tamil population in Southern India
- 9 % (Source) Pakistan
- 5 % (Source) Syria and Jordania
- 20 (Source) Yemen
- 9 % (Source) Saudi Arabia
- 10.1 % (Source) Turkey Black Sea region
The variability of frequencies is notable, even within the same region (see India for instance). Amerindians and NE Asians have extremely high prevalence of shoveling. There is a cline from East to West across Eurasia, but even in SE Asia and Australia, frequencies are high.
Not all shoveling is the same
Shoveling in Neanderthals, erectus and modern humans differ in shape, and is probably driven by different genes. In this sense Yuan, 2019 notes that "The type of shoveling teeth found in Neanderthals and Pleistocene Homo from Atapuerca-Sima de los Huesos may either be a different type from that of Asians and Africans or come from early dispersal of Homo from Asia to Europe."
But which genes are involved, or if there is an interplay of several, is a mystery.
Kimura, 2009 reported that the Ectodysplasin receptor Gene (EDAR) in its "EDAR 1540C alleles... was strongly correlated with the tooth-shoveling grade... The effect of the allele was additive and explained 18.9% of the total variance in the shoveling grade." But it seems that other alleles are involved in shoveling. Interestingly EDAR 1540C is absent in Africans, Denisovans, and Europeans (where shoveling is low) and high in East Asians and modern Amerindians.
Who has shoveled teeth? Frequencies
Bailey, 2006 provides some frequencies on incisor shoveling in different populations: 100% in Homo erectus, early Neanderthals, and late Neanderthals. At 33.3% in Early Africans and Modern Asians, 45.5% in Upper Paleolithic Humans in Europe, and 37.5% in modern Europeans.
Denisovans, in the only incisor found to date, from the Xujiayao specimen of North China, 220,000 to 160,000 years old shows "marked shovelling." (Xing, 2015 in Masojc, 2026).
Interestingly, Yuan, 2019 notes that "native Africans such as Khoisans are well known to have certain East Asian features such as shoveling teeth, epicanthic fold, and lighter skins." The Khoi are said to be the most diverse and divergent, and therefore the most ancestral lineage of modern humans on the planet. But no Neanderthal or Denisovans have been found in Africa, and admxiture there between the ancestors of the San and the Neanderthals and Denisovans is not believed to have happened.
Comments
There are several genes that regulate teeth shape (Qing, 2025), making it a "polygenic" trait.
Shoveling has been linked to one variant of the EDAR allele (I have posted about it and its presence in Asia and the Americas).
Research by Kaya and Merriwether, 2024 has shown that Shovel Shaped Incisors (SSI) and Carabelli's Cusp (CC) are both linked to other genes: "Fifteen SNPs/s belonging to SOSTDC1, FGF3, FGF4 and WNT10A were significantly associated with SSI and/CC expression." So there are several genetic drivers for shoveled teeth.
Regarding the EDAR variant in Amerindians and Asians; did it arise spontaneously as a mutation in modern humans in Asia and then spread in Northern and Eastern Asia, and the Americas?, or was it introgressed from other hominins living in that region, like Homo erectus or the Denisovans?
Also, why do the San people of South Africa have shoveled teeth, even though there is no known introgression of Neanderthals, Denisovans or erectus in that region? Is it an ancestral trait found in archaic hominins which admixed from ghost African populations? The lower frequency in Europe and Western Asia, as well as North Africa suggests that there were hominin populations which lacked the shovel teeth alleles. This suggests, in my opinion, that it is possibly a modern human trait, and that shovel teeth introgressed from other hominins in Central or Eastern Asia (Neanderthals, Denisovans, or erectus), and back migrated from there into Europe, Western Eurasia and Africa.
A very interesting and thorough article published in 1985 by Yuji Mizoguchi "Shovelling: A statistical analysis of its morphology" suggests that shoveled teeth are stronger than regular non-shoveled ones and that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle selected in favor of strong faces able to "resist powerful biting forces, and one of the causes of the need for such a powerful biting mechanism was possibly hunting activity directly or indirectly associated with heavy meat-eating."
Misoguchi distinguishes three kinds of shoveling:
(1) weak or moderate, with "a slightly swollen basal part of the lingual surface of the tooth crown and lingual marginal ridges converging towards the cervix" Found in the ancient australopithecus and in almost all contemporary humans. This one continued to exist in Africa since the Australopithecines, and is found in modern Africans. Found in modern Asians and Europeans too.
(2) strong, with highly develped parallel ridges on the teeth's margins "a very deep lingual fossa and a large lingual tubercle." Found among East Asian Neanderthals and Homo erectus. Western Eurasian Neanderthals had a blend of types (1) and (2).
(3) strongly marked shoveling but the marginal ridges converge on the cervix. Lacking a "developed lingual tubercle" The tubercle is different from that of erectus and Neanderthals. Found among Innuit, Native Americans.
With these three varieties in mind, the evolution and dispersal of shoveling is the following, according to Mizoguchi>
"In Africa, the first type of incisor has continued since the emergence of the hominid, In Europe, the first type changed to the second type before or at the stage of Neanderthals, and, later, back to the first type. In Asia, as in Europe, the second type once changed into the first type after the Neanderthal stage, but some Asian anterior teeth developed in a different way from before, presumably as a result of direct or indirect adaptation to a severely cold environment. Such incisors are the third type of incisor observable in the modern inhabitants of the Arctic and Americas."
Perhaps the sequence is (1) ancestral African, evolved into a derived one, (2), in Homo erectus in Eurasia and later retained in Neanderthal. Those who would later become modern humans retained the ancestral version, globally, and the (3) variant appeared in East Asia, possibly from admixture with Denisovans.
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