Dental Ritual Mutilations and Forensic Odontologist Practice: a Review of the Literature

BACKGROUND: Ethnic mutilations have a social and anthropological significance both in contemporary and past human behavior, influenced by geographic, religious and cultural factors which can greatly help forensic odontologist's practice in dental profiling process. Dental ritual mutilations and dental decorations were - and still are - practiced among many ethnic groups and cultures. Throughout the history of humanity, having healthy teeth has a symbolic meaning of youth, beauty and strength, but it can also have other meanings. Dental ritual mutilations were documented in many cultures in the past and were practiced mainly for religious rituals purposes, for esthetic reasons and because they represented a symbol of status or of belonging to a particular social group. Similar rituals are still performed. MATERIAL AND METHOD: The present paper is a systematic review of the literature reporting on dental ritual mutilations from the early 1960s and is included in Pubmed, Scopus and Googlescholar. The research was deliberately limited only to the ritual mutilations, which can be defined as "any irreversible impairment of the integrity of the human organism, made with a ritual purpose and without any curative aim". Therefore all the articles dealing with single or multiple dental self extractions of psychotic origins were excluded, as well as the infant oral mutilations, since the practice is deemed to have therapeutical effects among ethnic groups dedited to this practice. CONCLUSIONS: The knowledge of dental alteration due to oral mutilations can be a powerful tool for the identification procedures of living or dead persons or even in human remains especially providing relevant information about the ethnic origins and the cultural background of a subject. Some medical legal issues for the odontologist about dental mutilation are also addressed in the paper.