  We study spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking and the spectral properties of
the staggered lattice Dirac operator using quenched gauge configurations for
the exceptional group G2, which has a trivial center. In particular we study
the system below and above the finite temperature transition and use the
temporal boundary conditions of the fermions to probe the system. We evaluate
several observables: The spectral density at the origin, the spectral gap, the
chiral condensate and the recently proposed dual chiral condensate. We show
that chiral symmetry is broken at low temperatures and is restored at high
temperatures at the thermodynamic phase transition. Concerning the role of the
boundary conditions we establish that in all respects the spectral quantities
behave for G2 in exactly the same way as for SU(N), when for the latter group
the gauge ensemble above T_c is restricted to the sector of configurations with
real Polyakov loop.
