Although we expect accuracy to be generally high for most mammals hunted in North America, errors are also expected. The best application of cementum age analysis is for wildlife management because errors for a larger sample of teeth tend to cancel, resulting in an accurate picture of the overall age distribution for the population of interest. Individual hunters, on the other hand, are more interested in the single result for their harvested animal.
Our cementum age with an “A” reliability can be expected to have the highest accuracy, although this result can also be in error. Errors are unavoidable when the annual layers are so structured that even the most careful count will be incorrect. In a group of teeth from animals harvested by 20 hunters, for example, it should be expected that perhaps 2 or 3 will be incorrect with the most frequent error size being 1 year.