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Malocclusion and dental crowding arose 12,000 years ago with earliest farmers
Phys dot org ^ | February 4, 2015 | University College Dublin

Posted on 02/07/2015 10:06:25 AM PST by SunkenCiv

Hunter-gatherers had almost no malocclusion and dental crowding, and the condition first became common among the world's earliest farmers some 12,000 years ago in Southwest Asia...

By analysing the lower jaws and teeth crown dimensions of 292 archaeological skeletons from the Levant, Anatolia and Europe, from between 28,000-6,000 years ago, an international team of scientists have discovered a clear separation between European hunter-gatherers, Near Eastern/Anatolian semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers and transitional farmers, and European farmers, based on the form and structure of their jawbones...

In the case of hunter-gatherers, the scientists from University College Dublin, Israel Antiquity Authority, and the State University of New York, Buffalo, found a correlation between inter-individual jawbones and dental distances, suggesting an almost "perfect" state of equilibrium between the two. While in the case of semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers and farming groups, they found no such correlation, suggesting that the harmony between the teeth and the jawbone was disrupted with the shift towards agricultural practices and sedentism in the region... may be linked to the dietary changes among the different populations.

The diet of the hunter-gatherer was based on "hard" foods like wild uncooked vegetables and meat, while the staple diet of the sedentary farmer is based on "soft" cooked or processed foods like cereals and legumes. With soft cooked foods there is less of a requirement for chewing which in turn lessens the size of the jaws but without a corresponding reduction in the dimensions of the teeth, there is no adequate space in the jaws and this often results in malocclusion and dental crowding.

The link between chewing, diet, and related dental wear patterns is well known in the scientific literature. Today, malocclusion and dental crowding affects around one in five people in modern-world populations.

(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...


TOPICS: History; Science; Travel
KEYWORDS: agriculture; animalhusbandry; dentition; dietandcuisine; godsgravesglyphs; helixmakemineadouble; huntergatherers; prehistoricengland; teeth; toothdecay; unitedkingdom
Lower jaw and teeth of a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer. Credit: Olivia Cheronet

Lower jaw and teeth of a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer. Credit: Olivia Cheronet

1 posted on 02/07/2015 10:06:25 AM PST by SunkenCiv
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To: StayAt HomeMother; Ernest_at_the_Beach; decimon; 1010RD; 21twelve; 24Karet; 2ndDivisionVet; ...

2 posted on 02/07/2015 10:06:59 AM PST by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary men)
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To: SunkenCiv

Weston A Price says I told you so.


3 posted on 02/07/2015 10:09:57 AM PST by EEGator
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To: SunkenCiv

Judging from the stand, he must have been one of the Beaker people...


4 posted on 02/07/2015 10:11:20 AM PST by null and void (Our goal is language that is gender-, ethnic- and age-neutral, while celibrating our diversity!)
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To: SunkenCiv

It’s really funny as my dentist is the great Irish dentist Dr. Mel O’Clusion


5 posted on 02/07/2015 10:18:16 AM PST by AEMILIUS PAULUS
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To: SunkenCiv

Celery raw,
Develops the jaw;
But celery stewed,
Is more quietly chewed.

-Ogden Nash


6 posted on 02/07/2015 10:28:39 AM PST by Arm_Bears (Rope. Tree. Politician. Some assembly required.)
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To: SunkenCiv

Tooth size has been shrinking, as well, but I guess that the rates of shrinkage of jaws and teeth are not matched up very well.


7 posted on 02/07/2015 10:55:47 AM PST by exDemMom (Current visual of the hole the US continues to dig itself into: http://www.usdebtclock.org/)
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To: SunkenCiv

No doubt due to GMO corn products.


8 posted on 02/07/2015 11:00:30 AM PST by SolidRedState (I used to think bizarro world was a fiction.)
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To: Arm_Bears

Love it. :-)


9 posted on 02/07/2015 11:10:36 AM PST by FBD
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To: SunkenCiv

You read the same thing about some breeds of dogs like the bouvier dog which were bred to large size without a corresponding growth in it heart. So its a large dog with a small heart. As a result heart attacks are common with this breed.

The unexpected results of civilization.


10 posted on 02/07/2015 4:27:00 PM PST by ckilmer (q)
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To: SunkenCiv

So, hunter-gatherers (supposedly) didn’t cook their foods, but agriculturalists did; but the agriculturalists were domesticating and eating the wild foods their ancestors had gathered. Sounds like cooking, not growing, is the culprit.

Also, smacks of Lysenkoism to reduce jaw size by easier chewing, yet teeth remain unchanged in size, type, and quantity; seems, if anything, the jaw musculature is what would be affected.

<300 skeletons from 3 separate areas, and covering a time span of 22,000 years also seems like a pretty small sample to make sweeping conclusions.

Lots of articles and “studies” cropping up that seem to attempt discrediting agriculture as a positive human achievement. That makes me very skeptical and wary of (Agenda 21 type) motives.


11 posted on 02/07/2015 11:08:25 PM PST by ApplegateRanch (Love me, love my guns!©)
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To: ApplegateRanch

I agree.

What it looks like is (besides a too-small sample) is two populations merging after thousands of years of separation and isolation, or relatively short-term and recent inbreeding.


12 posted on 02/08/2015 5:47:19 AM PST by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary men)
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To: SunkenCiv
Where Do The Finns Come From?

"Grave findings have shown that late Palaeolithic settlers in central Europe and their Mesolithic descendants in the Scandinavian Peninsula were Europoids, who had compartively large teeth - a seemingly comical detail, but nevertheless an important factor in identifying these populations. Although it is very unlikely that the language of these settlers will ever be identified, I cannot see any grounds for the theory that either of these groups spoke Proto-Uralic.

"East Europeans have small teeth compared with the relatively large teeth of the Scandinavian, a peculiarity deriving from an age-old genetic distinction. Ancient skulls tell us that the early settlers of east Europe were mostly descendants of an ancient east European population which lived in prolonged isolation from the Scandinavians. Perhaps the "Siberian" element in Finnish genes is, in fact, east European in origin? "

13 posted on 02/08/2015 10:36:24 AM PST by blam (Jeff Sessions For President)
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To: ApplegateRanch; blam; ckilmer; exDemMom; Arm_Bears

How modern humans ate their way to world dominance
http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2015/02/how-modern-humans-ate-their-way-world-dominance

[snip] ...compared the genomes of modern humans and chimpanzees to the newly published genomes of a Neandertal and one of its close relatives, a mysterious human ancestor known as a Denisovan, known only from a few bones found in a Russian cave. All three groups of humans had lost two bitter taste genes, TAS2R62 and TAS2R64... early members of Homo likely found wild yams and other tubers bitter. But as humans began to cook, they could roast tuberous root vegetables long enough that they weren’t as bitter... hominins... lost those two particular bitter taste genes, so they were presumably able to eat a wider range of tuberous plants. Modern humans, Neandertals, and Denisovans all lost the ability to detect the bitter flavor in some wild plants and eventually modern humans bred varieties of squashes, gourds, and yams that are less bitter than the wild types... biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham of Harvard... has proposed that a key human ancestor, H. erectus, relied on cooking starchy tuberous roots to get enough calories to expand its brain. But if so, that distant ancestor wasn’t using extra copies of the amylase gene to extract more calories from these plant foods. [/snip]


14 posted on 02/10/2015 1:08:15 AM PST by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary men)
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