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Dental microwear texture analysis shows within-species diet variability in fossil hominins

Naturevolume 436, pages693–695 (2005)Cite this article

Abstract

Reconstructing the diets of extinct hominins is essential to understanding the paleobiology and evolutionary history of our lineage. Dental microwear, the study of microscopic tooth-wear resulting from use1,2,3,4, provides direct evidence of what an individual ate in the past. Unfortunately, established methods5,6,7,8,9,10 of studying microwear are plagued with low repeatability and high observer error11. Here we apply an objective, repeatable approach for studying three-dimensional microwear surface texture to extinct South African hominins. Scanning confocal microscopy12,13 together with scale-sensitive fractal analysis14,15,16,17,18,19 are used to characterize the complexity and anisotropy of microwear. Results for living primates show that this approach can distinguish among diets characterized by different fracture properties. When applied to hominins20, microwear texture analysis indicates thatAustralopithecus africanus microwear is more anisotropic, but also more variable in anisotropy thanParanthropus robustus. This latter species has more complex microwear textures, but is also more variable in complexity thanA. africanus. This suggests thatA. africanus ate more tough foods andP. robustus consumed more hard and brittle items, but that both had variable and overlapping diets.

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Figure 1:Scale-sensitive fractal analysis.
Figure 2:Microwear texture analyses.
Figure 3:Anisotropy and complexity.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the curators at the US National Museum of Natural History, the Transvaal Museum and the University of the Witwatersrand for permission to study specimens in their care, and thank A. Pérez-Pérez for his help preparing the hominin replicas. This project was funded by the US National Science Foundation.

Author information

Author notes

  1. Robert S. Scott and Peter S. Ungar: *These authors contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Arkansas, Arkansas, 72701, Fayetteville, USA

    Robert S. Scott & Peter S. Ungar

  2. Surface Metrology Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts, 01609, Worcester, USA

    Torbjorn S. Bergstrom & Christopher A. Brown

  3. Departments of Anthropology and Anatomical Sciences, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York, 11794, USA

    Frederick E. Grine

  4. Center for Functional Anatomy & Evolution, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Maryland, 21205, Baltimore, USA

    Mark F. Teaford

  5. Departments of Anthropology and Biology, Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania, 16802, University Park, USA

    Alan Walker

Authors
  1. Robert S. Scott

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  2. Peter S. Ungar

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  3. Torbjorn S. Bergstrom

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  4. Christopher A. Brown

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  5. Frederick E. Grine

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  6. Mark F. Teaford

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  7. Alan Walker

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Corresponding author

Correspondence toPeter S. Ungar.

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Competing interests

C.A.B. owns and operates Surfract (http://www.surfract.com), which developed and markets Kfrax. To the extent that someone might decide to purchase Kfrax as a result of this publication, he could benefit financially. Some features used in the analysis are in beta and development and are not commercially available.

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Scott, R., Ungar, P., Bergstrom, T.et al. Dental microwear texture analysis shows within-species diet variability in fossil hominins.Nature436, 693–695 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03822

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Editorial Summary

Once bitten

The measurement of the marks on fossilized teeth provides palaeontologists with direct evidence of what an individual ate in the past. The conventional approach to dental ‘microwear’ treats it as a set of features arbitrarily defined by individual observers on a two-dimensional image. A new approach eliminates some of the vagaries associated with the method by treating the worn surfaces as textures and measuring them in three dimensions. Use of this technique on a series of South African australopithecines suggests that the ‘gracile’Australopithecus africanus ate more tough foods thanParanthropus robustus, and thatParanthropus ate more hard, brittle items as part of more varied diet.

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