1. Department of Anthropology, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas 72701, USA
2. Surface Metrology Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts 01609, USA
3. Departments of Anthropology and Anatomical Sciences, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York 11794, USA
4. Center for Functional Anatomy & Evolution, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland 21205, USA
5. Departments of Anthropology and Biology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA
6. *These authors contributed equally to this work

Correspondence to: Peter S. Ungar^1,6 Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to P.S.U. (Email: pungar@uark.edu).

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 use^{1, 2, 3, 4}, provides direct evidence of what an individual ate in the past. Unfortunately, established methods^{5, 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 microscopy^{12, 13} together with scale-sensitive fractal analysis^{14, 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 that Australopithecus africanus microwear is more anisotropic, but also more variable in anisotropy than Paranthropus robustus. This latter species has more complex microwear textures, but is also more variable in complexity than A. africanus. This suggests that A. africanus ate more tough foods and P. robustus consumed more hard and brittle items, but that both had variable and overlapping diets.

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