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Creators/Authors contains: "Perez-Perez, A"

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  1. Dental microwear reflects the abrasiveness of foodstuffs consumed by extant primates and it is commonly used to trace dietary adapta-tions in fossil hominins. However, the impact of feeding events and ecological constraints on micro-scale tooth wear formation processes remain unclear. Here, we use dental buccal-mi-crowear analysis to test age-related effects of physical food processing on tooth-use in a natu-rally accumulated skeletal assemblage from the well-documented population of mountain gorillas from Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda. We analyzed dental microwear pattern of single teeth belonging to individual skeletons: 14 decid-uous m2 (aged 1.2-6.08 years) and 39 permanent molars (~90% M2) of adult gorillas (10.69-44.55 years, 25 males and 14 females). Our results indicate that adult gorillas present more abraded molar buccal surfaces, with significantly higher densities and longer micro-striations, than imma-ture individuals, which reflects the abrasive potential of ingested foods and the micro-stria-tion cumulative process. However, we also found that dental buccal-microwear variability was not associated with age when only adult gorillas were considered. Thus, gorillas from this popula-tion present a stable microwear pattern through adulthood, despite intraindividual variability in feeding ecology. Our findings show the cumulative process of dental buccal-microwear as immature mountain gorillas increase their intake of solid foods and develop an adult diet; but also, the stability of this pattern when diet over time is stable. We confirm that dental buccal-microwear variability is a reasonable proxy for feeding ecology in primates, although seasonality, habitat variability and diet proportions at individual level should be considered in future studies. 
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