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Teeth chronicle the past. Much like trees, they grow in rings and these rings, or growth marks, act like a record of development.

"Teeth retain the chemical signatures at the time when they were grown, starting at birth and ending in your late teens,” said Diana Malarchik, a Ph.D. candidate in the UC Davis . “Based on this anatomy, I can sample these growth rings and get nitrogen signatures and create a dietary timeline.”

Malarchik is a bioarcheologist interested in the diets of people long past. For part of her dissertation, she’s analyzing the geochemical signatures of hundreds of teeth from people who lived in the San Francisco area during the 1800s. Her research is revealing major shifts in breastfeeding and maternal behavior in the past.

Through geochemical analyses of a tooth, Malarchik can discern if and for just how long an individual was breastfed. In her analysis of teeth from people living in 1800s San Francisco, she has noticed three patterns:

• Gradual weaning: An individual is gradually weaned off breast milk over a few years.
• Shortened weaning: An individual shows signatures of roughly six months of breastfeeding.
• Absent signature: An individual shows no signature of breastfeeding.

“This is a significant discovery, as it means these people survived childhood with little or no support from breast milk,” Malarchik said. “Before the 20th century, breastfeeding was the only way a baby could get safe food and immune support. Without this, mothers would’ve turned to early versions of formula, which was just soaking bread in water. And to make it worse, the water was most likely full of harmful bacteria.”

But another pattern also emerged. Malarchik found that shortened and absent weaning signatures were more prevalent in those buried in public cemeteries, where no payment was required, versus those buried in private cemeteries, where plots were purchased by families.

Social status and breastfed babies

“Meaning that children from lower socioeconomic statuses were the most affected,” she said, noting that lower class new mothers most likely had to return to work much more quickly after giving birth. “If you were able to breastfeed, especially in a time pre-antibiotics, pre-vaccines, you’re going to be healthier as a child and then you’re going to be healthier as an adult.” 

According to Malarchik, this inequity in childrearing between upper and lower classes — something she sees in the isotopes she analyzes — persists to this day.

“In the U.S., only 13 states have some sort of paid family leave. I work in 91Porn, where I got paid time off in a department that is so supportive, and it’s still so difficult” said Malarchik, who is a new mother. “It’s so hard for me to imagine women who go back to work and don’t have that support and then on top of that, their kids are going to be sicker.”

Malarchik hopes her research will help bring awareness to issues concerning the societal challenges mothers face.

“Mothers today are still being forced to make many of the same decisions that their great, great, great grandmothers made in the 1800s,” Malarchik said. “Unless we learn from the past, we will be forced to relive it.”