Lower jaw and teeth of a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer. Credit: Olivia Cheronet
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 ...
Lower jaw and teeth of a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer. Credit: Olivia Cheronet
Weston A Price says I told you so.
Judging from the stand, he must have been one of the Beaker people...
It’s really funny as my dentist is the great Irish dentist Dr. Mel O’Clusion
Celery raw,
Develops the jaw;
But celery stewed,
Is more quietly chewed.
-Ogden Nash
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.
No doubt due to GMO corn products.
Love it. :-)
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.
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.
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.
"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? "
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]
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