Discriminating dental microwear textures of different seed-eaters: perspectives from a controlled feeding study with pigs
Résumé
The thick enameled, bunodont tooth morphology shared by most early hominins has traditionally been interpreted as an adaptation to durophagy, especially in the cranio-dentally robust genus Paranthropus. However, subsequent work using dental microwear textures (DMT) and isotope compositions have challenged this hypothesis, demonstrating contrasting patterns between eastern and southern African Paranthropus. Among various hypotheses proposed to explain these contrasting patterns, the ingestion of dust with food and the occasional consumption of hard seeds have received considerable attention. However, without an experimental baseline using taxa with bunodont, thick-enameled cheek teeth, it has proven difficult to interpret DMT of early hominins. In recent years, studies have shown that DMT can reflect subtle dietary differences in extant taxa, and controlled-feeding experiments permit investigation of the effects of specific resources on DMT.
Here, we investigate whether variations in DMT reflect the consumption of different types of seeds in bunodont mammals with similar overall diets. Seeds differ in terms of physical and mechanical properties, and consumption of different seeds may lead to different DMT patterns. Therefore, we conducted trials at the experimental unit GenESI from the INRAE (Vienne, France) on domestic pigs (Sus scrofa). We studied four groups: one fed with 100% wheat and soy flours (n = 6), and three fed the same flours supplemented with either 30% barley seeds (n = 5), 20% maize kernels (n = 6) or 10 unshelled hazelnuts per day (n = 6). Pigs were fed daily from about 2 to 8 months of age and received their dedicated diet for at least 75 days before death, except pigs fed with hazelnuts who received them only the last month. We analyzed DMT on crushing and shearing facets of upper/lower first molars, and on upper fourth deciduous premolars. Using a standardized surface sampling strategy, we performed PCA and ANOVAs to detect significant differences between dietary groups.
Although it has recently been argued that microwear textures are barely influenced by the hard tissues of plants, our results show that the groups exhibit significant variations in DMT depending on the type of seeds consumed. Moreover, although crushing facets are mostly considered in DMT analyses on hominins because they are thought to be more discriminant, we show that combining both types of facets improve the dietary discrimination on molars, but not on upper deciduous premolars.
Funding Sources French Agency For Research, ANR Diet-Scratches (ANR-17-CE27-0002-02) ALIHOM project, Région Nouvelle Aquitaine Ministère de l’Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche