The Person Behind the Teeth (2025)

Student(s): Veronica Bikowicz

Project Mentor(s): Nasser Malit

This project aims to answer the question, Can an individual’s teeth be used to profile who they were in life? Qualitative and quantitative data taken from a specimen found in a quarry in Louisville, NY, and now stored in the State University of New York at Potsdam’s Biological Anthropology Laboratory, was used to create a biological profile, scoring for three traits: ancestry, sex, and age. Analysis suggests that the specimen to be a European male that was already into their adulthood at the time of death. Police officials who initially discovered the specimen in a working sand quarry believe the remains of this individual come from an unknown disturbed grave from the time of the land’s previous owners.