Dental microwear texture analysis of extant African Bovidae

Abstract Bovids are often used as paleoenvironmental proxies because they are among the most commonly recovered large mammals at many fossil hominin sites and because modern African bovids occupy a wide range of dietary and environmental niches. This study uses dental microwear texture analysis to examine 25 species of extant African bovids, representing six dietary categories and with an emphasis on various levels of mixed feeding. The results show significant differences among the dietary classifications and confirm previous work suggesting that grazing taxa have less complex, more anisotropic surfaces with smaller features than browsing taxa. The results also indicate that dental microwear texture analysis can distinguish beyond the classic grazer-browser-mixed feeder trichotomy and accurately separate variable grazers, generalists, browser-grazer intermediates and frugivores from obligate grazers and browsers, as well as from one another. Some differences among taxa within dietary categories were also found, probably reflecting seasonal and/or geographic differences in diet. In addition to demonstrating the effectiveness of the technique at differentiating between different levels of mixed feeding in bovids, this study also provides a comprehensive comparative dataset of extant bovid microwear textures that can be applied to fossil taxa from sites and time periods across Africa.

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