Dental microwear can teach us about diet and tooth-use behaviors of past peoples and fossil primates. Specific foods leave distinctive patterns of microscopic scratches and pits that can be read to help us reconstruct food preferences of long-gone human populations and extinct species. Dental microwear analysis is different from the typical tooth form–function approach that paleontologists use to reconstruct diet because it tells us something about what a specific individual ate at a point in time in the past rather than what it was capable of eating, or what its own ancestors evolved to eat.