Dental Microwear Analysis:WearWe Are Going,WearWe Have Been

Abstract

Dental microwear research rests at the boundary between biology and engineering. More specifically, it combines basic principles of ecology with tribology, “the science and technology of interacting surfaces in relative motion and the practices related thereto”. The earliest studies to document relationships between microwear pattern and diet were comparative in nature. The idea was to determine whether species with known food preferences had distinctive and predictable microwear signatures. While “real-world” oral environments are more complex with many variables difficult to simulate in vitro, chewing machines do allow for control over conditions and easy testing of effects of abrasive type and load, food material properties, and so on. In vivo studies in aggregate speak to the potential of microwear as a diet proxy, but caution that its formation is complex, and this should be considered when using microwear to infer diets of bioarchaeological and paleontological samples.

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