US National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences Memberships, Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award, Fulbright Foundation Specialist Awards to South Africa and to Finland, American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellowship, Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars Membership
Ungar is known primarily for his work on the role of diet inhuman evolution.[1][2][3][4] He has spent thousands of hours observing wild apes and other primates in the rainforests of Latin America and Southeast Asia, studied fossils fromtyrannosaurids toNeandertals, documented oral health of the Hadza Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania, and developed new techniques for using advanced surface analysis technologies to tease information about diet from tooth shape and patterns of use wear.[5][6][7]
Ungar has written or coauthored more than 230 scientific works onecology andevolution for books and journals includingNature, Science,Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, andPhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.[8] 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.[9] His bookMammal Teeth: Origin, Evolution and Diversity[10] won the PROSE Award for best book in the Biological Sciences, and he editedEvolution of the Human Diet: The Known, the Unknown and the Unknowable and coeditedHuman Diet: Its Origins and Evolution.[11] His forays into popular science writing include[12]Teeth: A Very Short Introduction, and his most recent trade book,[13]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 theDiscovery Channel,BBC Television, and theScience Channel.
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."
