Peter Ungar

Peter S. Ungar (born May 4, 1963) is an American paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist.

Life Peter S. Ungar is Distinguished Professor and Director of the Environmental Dynamics Program at the University of Arkansas. Before arriving at Arkansas, he taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Duke University Medical Center.

Ungar is known primarily for his work on the role of diet in human evolution. He has spent thousands of hours observing wild apes and other primates in the rainforests of Latin America and Southeast Asia, studied fossils from tyrannosaurids to Neandertals, documented the oral health of the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, and developed new techniques for using advanced surface analysis technologies to extract dietary information from tooth shape and wear patterns.

Ungar has written or coauthored more than 250 scientific works on ecology and evolution for books and journals including Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. These have focused on food choices and feeding in living primates, and the role of diet in the evolution of human ancestors and other fossil species. His book Mammal Teeth: Origin, Evolution and Diversity won the PROSE Award for best book in the Biological Sciences, and he edited Evolution of the Human Diet: The Known, the Unknown and the Unknowable and coedited Human Diet: Its Origins and Evolution. His forays into popular science writing include Teeth: A Very Short Introduction, and his most recent trade book, Evolution's Bite: A Story about Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins.

Ungar's work has been featured in hundreds of electronic, print, and broadcast media outlets, and he appeared recently in documentaries on the Discovery Channel, BBC Television, and the Science Channel.

Selected publications

Peter S. Ungar, "The Trouble with Teeth: Our teeth are crowded, crooked and riddled with cavities. It hasn't always been this way", Scientific American, vol. 322, no. 4 (April 2020), pp. 44–49. "Our teeth [...] evolved over hundreds of millions of years to be incredibly strong and to align precisely for efficient chewing. [...] Our dental disorders largely stem from a shift in the oral environment caused by the introduction of softer, more sugary foods than the ones our ancestors typically ate."

Books Ungar, P.S. Evolution's Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins. 2017. Ungar, P.S. Teeth: A Very Short Introduction. 2014. Ungar, P.S. Mammal Teeth: Origin, Evolution, and Diversity. 2010.