Feeding behavior and diet in Paranthropus boisei: The limits of functional inference from the mandible

Abstract

The craniofacial morphology of Paranthropus boisei is highly derived, representing the evolutionary culmination of one robust australopith lineage. Following its discovery, OH 5 was popularly described as “Nutcracker Man,” and this image of the East African robust australopiths as hard-object feeders has persisted for the last half-century. Emerging lines of evidence, however, suggest that the diet of this species was not primarily comprised of hard foods. An alternative view is that P. boisei consumed a relatively tough diet of grasses and sedges. As the covariation of diet and/or feeding behavior with mandibular morphology has been the focus of a voluminous literature, this paper evaluates whether the jaws of P. boisei – interpreted within a framework of masticatory mechanics in particular and bone biology in general – can be interpreted as functionally coherent with a herbivorous diet that lacked a significant component of durophagy. In terms of proportion and geometry, australopith mandibles have no parallel among living primates and P. boisei represents the extreme expression of this morphotype. From the perspective of primate masticatory biomechanics, the inference of loading regimes experienced in this fossil species is speculative, and subsequent inference of diet from corpus geometry should be regarded with skepticism. However, in terms of overall mandibular architecture, and from what is known about the biomechanical influences governing bone hypertrophy, competing hypotheses of dietary specialization are equally plausible on morphological criteria. Mandibular hypertrophy is an expected outcome of a fibrous diet requiring extensive and prolonged mastication, especially in a taxon in which occlusal morphology is suboptimal for the breakdown of fibrous foods.