This morning, Cecilia García Campos passed the viva voce for her doctoral thesis, entitled Characterization of the dental tissues of the permanent canines in modern and Pleistocene populations from the Sierra de Atapuerca (Burgos) using micro-computed tomography (micro-CT): Sexual dimorphism and other paleobiological inferences, supervised by María Martinón Torres, Director and researcher at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), and José María Bermúdez de Castro, coordinator of the Paleobiology Program at the same center.

Lying within the field of dental histology, this work has sought to explore sexual variability in the dimensions of the enamel and dentin of the permanent canines of modern and past populations by micro-CAT imaging, conducted in the Microscopy and Micro-Computed Tomography Laboratory of the CENIEH, applied to an extensive forensic sample as well as to the exceptional fossil collections from Gran Dolina and Sima de los Huesos, in the Sierra de Atapuerca.

Among the most important results yielded by this doctoral thesis, one highlight is the development of a new methodology for sex estimation, which reaches rates of accuracy of 92.3% in modern humans. In addition, evaluation of the dimensions of the dental tissues in the hominin canines from the Sima de los Huesos has been able to offer new paleodemographic information about this population, by estimating the sex of many of the individuals comprising it. Finally, study of the canine ATD6-13 has made it possible to suggest a sex assignment for the fossil known as El Chico de la Gran Dolina.

The jury, chaired by Concepción de la Rua, of the Universidad del País Vasco, and also made up of Almudena Estalrrich, of the Universidad de Cantabria; Laura Martín Francés, of the CENIEH; Eugenia Cunha, of the University of Coimbra; and Bernardo Perea Pérez, director of the School of Legal Medicine in Madrid, awarded the new Universidad de Burgos doctor the mark of cum laude.