Environmental Dynamics Program, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA.
Department of Anthropology, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA.
Am J Primatol. 2024 May;86(5):e23608. doi: 10.1002/ajp.23608. Epub 2024 Feb 14.
Molar and incisor microwear reflect aspects of food choice and ingestive behaviors in living primates and have both been used to infer the same for fossil samples. Canine microwear, however, has received less attention, perhaps because of the prominent role canines play in social display and because they are used as weapons-while outside of a few specialized cases, their involvement in diet related behaviors has not been obvious. Here, we posit that microwear can also provide glimpses into canine tooth use in ingestion. Canines of Sumatran long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis), agile gibbons (Hylobates agilis), lar gibbons (Hylobates lar), Thomas' leaf monkeys (Presbytis thomasi), and orangutans (Pongo abelii), and two African great apes, bonobos (Pan paniscus) and common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii), were considered. The labial tips of maxillary canine replicas were scanned using a white-light confocal profiler, and both feature and texture analyses were used to characterize microwear surface patterning. The taxa exhibited significant differences in canine microwear. In some cases, these were consistent with variation in reported anterior tooth use such that, for example, the orangutans, known to use their front teeth extensively in ingestion, had the highest median number of microwear features on their canines, whereas the gibbons, reported to use their front teeth infrequently in food acquisition, had the lowest.
臼齿和门齿的微观磨损反映了活体灵长类动物在食物选择和摄食行为方面的特点，并且都被用于推断化石样本的情况。然而，犬齿的微观磨损受到的关注较少，也许是因为犬齿在社交展示中扮演着重要的角色，并且被用作武器——尽管在少数特殊情况下，它们在与饮食相关的行为中的参与并不明显。在这里，我们假设微观磨损也可以提供有关犬齿在摄食中的使用情况的线索。苏门答腊长尾猕猴（Macaca fascicularis）、敏捷长臂猿（Hylobates agilis）、银白长臂猿（Hylobates lar）、托马斯叶猴（Presbytis thomasi）和猩猩（Pongo abelii）以及两种非洲大猿，倭黑猩猩（Pan paniscus）和普通黑猩猩（Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii）的上颌犬齿复制件的唇侧尖端被白光共聚焦轮廓仪扫描，并且使用特征和纹理分析来描述微观磨损表面的图案。这些类群在犬齿微观磨损方面表现出显著差异。在某些情况下，这些差异与报告的前牙使用的变化一致，例如，已知在摄食中广泛使用前齿的猩猩，其犬齿上的微观磨损特征中位数最高，而报告中很少在前齿中获取食物的长臂猿，其犬齿上的微观磨损特征中位数最低。
