Dental wear is a function of age-at-death in human skeletal populations. However, discrete scoring proxies of dentine exposure areas have shown to largely depend on dietary life-history and cultural practices. In addition, dental wear greatly limits research on dental morphological variability since unworn teeth are scarce in osteo-archaeological repositories. Age at death is seldom known, and actual trends in dental crown loss are generally assumed to be age-dependent. We applied three-dimensional (3D) dental crown continuous metrics (geometric morphometrics and topographic shape descriptors) to explore the association of first and second permanent maxillary (UM1 and UM2) and mandibular (LM1 and LM2) molar wear with age in the Coimbra International Exchange known age-at-death skull collection. Results are indicative of significant regressions between the morphometric variables and age-at-death, though showing coefficients of determination of 1.4–23.9%. The precision percentages for determining age-at-death from dental crown shape varied from 31.8 to 45.3%, while a significant portion of the overall shape variation of the molar teeth studied could be attributed to anatomical traits independently of dental wear, since modern human populations display a great variability in cusp patterns and molar teeth relative size.

在人类骨骼中，牙齿磨损是死亡年龄的函数。然而，已显示牙本质暴露区域的离散评分代理在很大程度上取决于饮食生活史和文化习惯。另外，由于未磨损的牙齿在骨考古库中是稀缺的，因此牙齿磨损极大地限制了牙齿形态变异性的研究。死亡年龄鲜为人知，并且一般认为牙冠丢失的实际趋势与年龄有关。我们使用三维（3D）牙冠连续量度（几何形态计量学和地形形状描述符）来探讨科英布拉国际组织第一和第二永久上颌骨（UM1和UM2）与下颌骨（LM1和LM2）磨牙磨损与年龄之间的关系交换已知的死亡年龄头骨收藏。结果表明形态计量学变量和死亡年龄之间有显着回归，尽管确定系数为1.4–23.9％。从牙冠形状中确定死亡年龄的精确度百分比在31.8％至45.3％之间，而自现代人口以来，所研究的磨牙的整体形状变化的很大一部分可归因于与牙齿磨损无关的解剖学特征在尖齿样式和臼齿相对大小方面显示出很大的变化。