4 ms·

I went to an exhibit of an excavation of an old (4th/5th century) settlement in the Adriatic and it detailed every single skeleton pulled out of the different c

• londons_explore 4y ago
  Go back another 2000 years or so, and nearly every one has great teeth... The switch of grain-based diets is suspected to be a big part of the cause.
  • leobg 4y ago
    AFAIK, Ötzi (3230 BC) had cavities.
    • murukesh_s 4y ago
      well, Ötzi ate wheat..
• culi 4y ago
  Yup makes sense. From what I've read, the switch to relying on more starch in our diets played a big role and that's a population that very much relied on a select few primary crops It's important to remember that hunter gatherers had much more diverse diets than agriculturalists (and therefore also much better food stability). I would posit that any member of a primarily agricultural society had terrible teeth. But we generally see this less in non-agricultural diets That being said, when you have Inuit people eating mostly meat with moss being a major plant source and Ryukyuan people turning an extremely poisonous plant (cycads) into everything from flour to alcohol, it's important to note that ANY generalization about human diets (and the health outcomes heavily affected by those diets) is hard to generalize