Where and when? Combining dental wear and death seasons to improve paleoenvironmental reconstruction through ungulate diets

Abstract

Dental meso- and microwear are proxies that allow the diet to be reconstructed. Applied to herbivores, these proxies provide information on vegetation structure and composition. Several studies on fossil populations have proposed environmental reconstructions based on these methods. These studies often focus on a few selected taxa and rarely consider the total variability of ungulate diets at sites in contexts where the seasonality of occupations is often not estimated. The variability of the ungulate diet associated with a better knowledge of the moment of their death can greatly improve the quality and resolution of the environmental interpretation at the scale past hominins experienced. In this paper, we propose a new approach to dental wear to reconstruct environments. We recommend including all available ungulates according to their abundance in the faunal spectrum to consider as many habitats as possible. The combination of dental meso- and microwear allows us to address two scales of time and space–the regional scale over several years and the local scale over one season, respectively. Applied to Teixoneres Cave (Units IIIa and IIIb, Spain) and Pié Lombard (Ensemble II, France), the results confirm previous microfauna analysis and make it possible to characterize the intensity of seasonal turnover.