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Ancient switch to soft food gave us overbite–the ability to pronounce 'f's,'v'
- romaaeterna 2y agoThe switch from aspirate to fricative pronunciations in Greek was between 2-400AD, and was related to ongoing processes in the language unrelated to jaw change. I'm also skeptical of the only piece of data presented in the article, that it's 29% easier to pronounce these sounds with an overbite. Is that a stable measurement? How much does that speed childhood acquisition of the capacity for these sounds? Percentage of the population that cannot make the sounds at all?
- iwontberude 2y agoThis is bullshit, a five second test let’s you know.
- BJones12 2y agoJust a reminder that we are in the middle of a silent epidemic of small jaws [0] and that if you feed your kids hard food they will grow up to be healthier and more attractive. [0]] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32973408/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32973408/
- iwsk 2y ago...so mewing is real and it is not a coincidence that it's suddenly a thing now?
- tkahnoski 2y agoMewing is something intended to address this, but evidence isn't there. Everyone wants a non-invasive solution rather than jaw expanders, braces, retainers etc.. so depending on where your bias, you might be against "Big-Ortho" and try this, or you could invest in proven orthodontics.
- fsckboy 2y ago> proven Dr Mew doesn't claim that orthodontics don't work, he points out they are expensive and lucrative, and he claims that if we maintain a "jaw healthy" diet from childhood, orthodontic problems will be much less prevalent in the population (this is a related but independent claim from the "mewing" regimen) He says that the evidence is found by comparing modern jaws/bites with historical skulls which show there has been a dramatic "20th century" emergence of orthodontic problems which would indicate a developmental issue rather than a genetic one. I don't know if he is correct or not, but it's a claim that can be independently measured/verified. Instead of using and publishing such sound science, the orthodontia community is using "cancellation" against him which certainly matches the lucrative aspect, though doesn't provide direct evidence.
- hombre_fatal 2y agoWell, can you link us to the best scientific evidence that he's not full of shit instead of just saying he's being "cancelled"? Please no more blog posts or journal articles.
- fsckboy 2y agoyou sound angry, science is best conducted from a neutral POV I've listened to his evidence, repeated it clearly here for you, and am aware of no counterevidence. there is nothing wrong with calling his license revocation over this precise topic "cancellation"; cancellation is a more precise term than "full of shit" which could refer to constipation. You don't seem curious to learn, the hallmark of HN's ethos.
- moralestapia 2y agoWhat is hard food? Can you be more specific? I am definitely interested in this.
- bitwize 2y agoDoes it go "crunch" in your mouth? Even things like crackers may count, but generally hard foods include raw vegetables and certain fruit like apples and nuts.
- NalNezumi 2y agoNot OP, but I remember as a kid being told to eat crispbread (freely available in schools, I assume in most of Scandinavia) because it was good for your teeth/jaw. I guess one could also include chewy / starchy food; my Asian side family had similar saying but more towards chewing thing properly. (chew 100 times per food in mouth) So things like crispbread, (raw) carrots, dried fruits/vegetables/meat/squid, etc
- bloomingkales 2y agoSome people chew on the bones of meat.
- Vecr 2y agoThat's too hard. Chew on raw carrots.
- moralestapia 2y agoI chew raw carrots regularly, and they also clean your mouth as well.
- tosser0001 2y agoAnything that requires hard chewing like nuts, raw vegetables and tough meats. The first I ever heard of this topic was from reading the book "The Evolution of the Human Head" (2011) by Daniel E. Lieberman. It's an academic book, and parts are not exactly light reading targeted for the general public. I had read it when it first came out, seemingly well before it because such of point of discussion. The problem with this topic is, if you try to look anything up on line you can quickly find yourself in the "manosphere" with its associated toxicity.
- gattr 2y agoOn a related (?) note, I was taken aback by the scene from "Kill Bill 2" ([1]), where Bill makes a sandwich for Bibi and... cuts off the crust. And it was the soft "toast" bread anyway. Doing this was not a thing when I was a kid; actually, eating the crunchy heel of a (Central-European style) loaf was a pleasure. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXXXIokuYGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXXXIokuYGM
- cafard 2y agoI grew up in the Wonder Bread days, and definitely remember people cutting off the crusts.
- saalweachter 2y agoThis is an absurdly common request from small children. If you don't do it, you may still find them eating around the crusts, for instance if you cut a sandwich in half, or even gnawing through a single point on the sandwich's crust and then leaving behind a crust-rind when they're done. As a parent, you're then left with no other choice than to eat all of the grilled cheese rinds yourself, so you don't tend to push too hard on the childish habit.
- crazygringo 2y agoAs a kid, I hated the crust. It tasted gross. But that's because it was gross industrial bread to begin with, and the crust was just drier and unpleasant. But I also remember eating sourdough with its chewy crust and loving that. Cutting off crusts is very specific to bread that is bad to begin with, I think.
- niceice 2y agoRich vs poor. The rich can literally chop off food and throw it in the trash.
- barrucadu 2y agoBut the crust is nice, why would you throw it away just because you're rich?
- dpcx 2y agoThis is discussed at length in (Breath)[0] which also discusses other things about how it's caused issues with breathing. [0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48890486-breath https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48890486-breath
- begueradj 2y agoThat's also why humans have maybe the weakest teeth among the mammals ... and a narrow mouth which caused us to lose certain teeth we no longer have nowadays. In an interview with Joe Rogan, James Nestor suggested to encourage our kids to eat non soft food daily.
- soperj 2y agoDoes he give some examples of non soft foods?
- hombre_fatal 2y agoGuy sounds like a crockpot like half of Joe Rogan's guests these days, but isn't it obvious which foods make you chew or not? Compare yogurt to a bowl of vegetables.
- yial 2y agoSecretly, he just doesn’t think Joe Rogan listeners feed their kids enough raw vegetables.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- triceratops 2y ago> Guy sounds like a crockpot Ironic you can only make soft foods with those
- dddw 2y ago
- user9999999999 2y ago[flagged]
- deadbabe 2y agoWhat sounds can we only pronounce with underbites?
- tboyd47 2y agoThere's a sound you can make like an /f/ by pressing your lower row of teeth against your top lip and blowing. That one. (It sounds basically the same as /f/).
- peterfirefly 2y agoI can easily make it when pushing my lower jaw forward (to give myself an underbite). Pretty sure everybody else can too. The kids I met with an underbite (when I myself was a kid) had no trouble making that sound.
- naniwaduni 2y agoInterestingly, I find it perceptually closer to /θ/... would want to try recording though.
- pineaux 2y agoI really dont buy the premisse of this piece. I can easily make the same sounds with an underbite
- talideon 2y agoI think you're misunderstanding things a bit: it's the jaw misalignment that leads to an overbite (or underbite) the allows the pronunciation of these sounds. Whichever you have, you're still producing labiodentals. What changed is that huge swathes of the population went over time from having aligned jaws to misaligned jaws, which is what lead to the sounds becoming common. The fact that people can have underbites and produce the sound is immaterial: the number of people with underbites has never been particularly large except in groups unless your surname was Habsburg.
- tlb 2y agoBut is it comfortable to talk that way for hours? Can you shout and whisper and sing that way? If not, people would've gradually shifted to easier sounds.
- turtlemir 2y agoI feel there are so many health issues plaguing our modern population. -Bad conditions for eyes leads to growing amounts of glasses wearers, glasses make an active healthy lifestyle harder, early health development seems really important (playing physically as a kid) putting glasses on kids seems a terrible thing, and worse, people act like this is normal. -The types of food we eat, and our bad breathing habits (maybe from posture or air pollution), maybe even our tongue posture, leave us with poor jawlines, poor facial structure. -Our disconnect from the natural world leaves us unwhole. -The extreme of either sedentary lifestyles (office worker) or too repetitively physical (warehouse worker) breaks people down. Its really sad, most people I see today seem really unhealthy. Fat or flabby, aching body, bad posture, stressed out. I fell into the trap too, had to loose 50 pounds recently. Cleaned up diet, working on posture, flexibility, strength, proper muscle activation, knowing ones body. And that is hard to do, maybe only possible because a WFH job lends towards healthy living. Most are not so fortunate. Also having no family or responsibility beside myself really helps. But neglecting such things are not sustainable for society. We need a society where being healthy is easier, and better rewarded. I am sorry if this rant is not acceptable to Hacker News, but I wish as a society our focus was "what makes us healthy". Literally that should be a primary principle in guiding our politics. Compared to the rest of history, we are living in a special time, at least in developed countries. We have the means to be creating healthy, beautiful, smart, well rounded, well adjusted individuals. But I feel the opposite is happening, and it seems like the majority of people don't care
- SirHumphrey 2y ago"Our disconnect from the natural world" makes us not die at 40 from a broken leg.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gjsman-1000 2y ago> putting glasses on kids seems a terrible thing, and worse, people act like this is normal I'm not following on this one - is it because this may make them less physically active? You should be asking what kind of vision problems they may have, that got them the glasses in the first place. For example, I have astigmatism, have crossed eyes without glasses, and +8 power correction. I had to have surgery when I was 3 years old just to be able to get glasses in the future. Not having glasses is a great way to make me miserable and unable to see or read anything.
- AndrewKemendo 2y ago“By means of some 90 models of Eskimo teeth, Dr. Adelbert Fernald, Curator of the Harvard Dental School Museum, has proved that eating a strictly meat diet is the ideal way in which to keep the human mouth in a healthy condition, and that it is due to the fact that civilized people do not eat enough meat that they as a rule have decayed teeth.” - Harvard Crimson (1929) [1]* The neolithic flip completely upended the world of Homo-Sapiens such that majority of modern humans come from the bottlnecked group of 10-100k sapiens that left Africa, interbred with Neanderthal and developed the structural heirarchical systems that dominate the world now. Almost no humans today eat, cohabitate, socialize, “work” or play in a way that is coherent with our biology. *Notable that the student newspaper from 1929 is better science reporting than any news outlet today [1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1929/1/29/esquimo-teeth-prove-health-of-meat/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1929/1/29/esquimo-teeth-p...
- hombre_fatal 2y agoSomeone's claim in a 1929 blog satisfies your epistemic standards? Most ancient mummies also have atherosclerosis. Fortunately we can run the test today to see what causes these things, not regress to story-telling about what might be true because we want to believe it. "Coherent with our biology" is just going to cash out into yet more story-telling over evidence.
- AndrewKemendo 2y agoNo the in depth multi year longitudinal reference study on the inuit that was referenced meets my standards
- Daishiman 2y ago> Almost no humans today eat, cohabitate, socialize, “work” or play in a way that is coherent with our biology. We have adaptations for lactose tolerance that emerged in the fast few thousand years. Our extremely energy-intensive brains can only be fed because we pre-digest our meals through fire. We are, in fact, quite well adapted to the society that we've built, certainly much more so than peoples who had to spend a good chunk of their life just looking for food and not dying of mosquito-borne diseases.
- reverendsteveii 2y agoNot me trying to pronounce those with an underbite just to be contrarian
- pinoy420 2y ago[flagged]
- reverendsteveii 2y agobreh
- ryanmcbride 2y agoI was able to!
- tiltowait 2y agoI have an underbite and pronounce those sounds just fine, so I’m a little suspicious of the assertion.
- talideon 2y agoThey're labiodentals. It doesn't matter whether you've an overbite or an underbite. It's contact between the lips and teeth that matter. It's just most of us ended up with the former.
- ggm 2y agoFor me "vee" was the hardest
- fmbb 2y agoOui
- perthmad 2y agoIt reminds me of this weird theory about proto-Castillan. According to some scholars, the change from initial /f/ in Latin to /h/ in Spanish could have been caused by the bad teeth of the speakers of lore, a phenomenon ultimately due to the water quality in some areas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_change_%22f_%E2%86%92_h%22_in_Spanish#Alternative_hypotheses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_change_%22f_%E2%86%92... Needless to say I've always found this hypothesis doesn't really hold water...
- talideon 2y agoIt doesn't hold water. It's just a typical form of lenition. plenty of languages exhibit the same phenomenon. The example I'm most familiar with is Irish, where /f/ under certain phonological and grammatical conditions softens to almost nothing (written "fh" to maintain the underlying sound). The interesting thing is that the exact same set of circumstances causes /p/ to soften to /f/ (written "ph" to maintain the underlying sound). The sound didn't go away, but its partial disappearance became grammaticalised into what's called "séimhiú", which is incidentally appropriate as it contains an example of the phenomenon. So yeah, the hypothesis is most likely bunk.
- Tainnor 2y agoA similar sort of grammatical lenition is IIRC used in Sindarin, one of the languages created by JRR Tolkien who was inspired by Celtic languages.
- elnatro 2y agoAll speakers of old Spanish had bad teeth? And from all zones? Doesn’t make sense.
- ysavir 2y agoI don't know anything about Spanish language changes, but a change needn't have the entire population afflicted in order to occur-just enough people for it to become fashionable. And as modern trends constantly demonstrate, fashionable trends can come from anywhere, no matter how small a section of of a population, nor how silly the trend seems to be to the population at large, even as the population at large is overtaken by the fashion.
- crazygringo 2y agoHow reliable is this finding? It's hard to believe that we gained an overbite over a few thousand years. Evolution doesn't generally happen that fast, nor will it happen worldwide at the same time. And the idea that someone born today will develop an overbite vs edge-to-edge bite based on diet is generally not accepted by scientists, correct? And trying to prove how ancient peoples pronounced words seems virtually impossible. It's one thing to find a change in writing, but it's another thing to assume you know how the given consonants were actually pronounced. Even today, there can be gigantic variation in pronunciation between dialects of the same language, including consonants. So this finding seems extremely hypothetical at best, unless I'm missing something?
- tsimionescu 2y agoThis is not about a genetic, evolutionary change from an underbite/edge-to-edge mastication back to overbite/up-down mastication. The theory is that this happens in individual humans based on their diet growing up: if you were to take a hunter gatherer child and raise them with a modern diet, they would have the modern overbite; and conversely, if you raised your child with a hunter-gatherer diet, they would develop an underbite. And while the exact cause may be debatable, as is the impact on language, the fact that this change happened over the last few thousand years is established fact, easily visible in human skeletons.
- metalman 2y agoHunter gatherer is not a monolithic term, and it is completly obvious that humans have adapted to inumerable diets in countless ecological nieches. We have always been omnivores and semi nomadic and in the vast majority of cases have utilised dramaticaly diffrent food sources, based on seasonal availibility, and chance oportunity. Cant see any plausable reason to make the conection that is bieng made with language.
- tsimionescu 2y agoIt's not a monolithic term, but there are commonalities that define it. For example, all hunter gatherers lead at least partly nomadic lifestyles, without any fully permanent settlements (though they can have constructions they gather to, and sometimes spend significant parts of a year at). As such, they won't have, or at least not rely significantly on, things like mills or cutlery. This will mean that, in all climates, hunter gatherers will have a diet that requires much more physical effort to tear off and chew than most agricultural societies, and definitely much more so than any modern diet.
- ComputerGuru 2y agoCan someone help me find this amazing site that was once featured on HN that had basically a cut-out anatomical view of the human mouth and throat and then you could pick any sound to see how the body forms it with an animation in-sync with the audio (iirc)?
- jszymborski 2y agohttps://dood.al/pinktrombone/ https://dood.al/pinktrombone/
- newfocogi 2y agoThat was wild
- yorwba 2y agohttps://seeingspeech.ac.uk/ipa-charts/ https://seeingspeech.ac.uk/ipa-charts/
- justinko 2y agoIt also gave us sleep apnea. Agriculture was without a doubt the worst thing to ever happen to us.
- Zenbit_UX 2y agoNa, the worst thing to ever happen to us was hyperbole.
- theultdev 2y agoNothing stopping you from reversing the trend and start hunting if your sleep apnea is so bad.
- marssaxman 2y agoNothing but the fact that agriculturally-based civilization has already claimed the land, cleared the forests, farmed the grasslands, and killed off the wild animals, so you'd spend your time starving to death and hiding from game wardens: but at least you'd get better sleep, maybe.
- tlb 2y agoThere are lots of places you can still hunt (or trap) and gather. The actual problem most people would face is (a) they're not very good at it and (b) it's extremely tedious.
- marssaxman 2y agoYou can still hunt and trap a little, sure, but I took the previous commenter to be suggesting that one could trade agricultural civilization for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and I can't see how a person could get enough calories to survive that way without egregiously violating bag limits. Maybe up in Alaska or the Yukon you could still get away with it, but here in Washington, a little quick math suggests that hunting all the deer and game birds you're allowed in a year would only keep you fed for 6-8 weeks.
- amriksohata 2y ago_When humans switched to processed foods after the spread of agriculture, they put less wear and tear on their teeth. _ What? When were foods processed thousands of years ago? Also Carrots and fruit are not "soft"
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ivanbakel 2y agoHumans have been processing foods for a long time. Milling, threshing, malting, fermentation are all traditional processing techniques which often make food easier and more nutritious to consume. And while cultivated fruits and veggies are not pap-soft, they are significantly less fibrous than seeds, stalks, husks etc that you would get from foraged, unprocessed food. Especially our farmed leaves are much softer than grass, leaves etc, that animals eat.
- nkrisc 2y agoVarious breads, cheeses, and alcoholic drinks have been produced for thousands of years. Grains were domesticated well over 10,000 years ago, cheese has been produced for at least 7,000 years, and alcoholic drinks probably as long as grains have been farmed, if not longer. Likewise, humans have been curing and preserving meats and other food for thousands of years as well. "Processed" doesn't just mean Doritos.
- tlb 2y agoIn the Levant and Europe, they ground up wheat to make flour and baked it into bread. You can eat raw wheat but it's a lot of work. In the Americas they ground up corn instead. In Africa, millet. In New Guinea they still harvest sago palms. They chop up the insides, extract the starch through several washing cycles, and make a sort of pancake out of it. The palm itself is inedible. Harvesting a palm takes several people all day. In the end they have a portable, storable, easily digestible food. Around the Pacific, taro has to be cooked and mashed before eating. It's toxic if you don't cook it and discard the water. A lot of greens need to be cooked too due to calcium oxalate.
- hello_computer 2y agoLeaning on the biological and evolutionary conclusions of linguists... New talk-show "science" to replace the old talk-show "science".
- thaumasiotes 2y ago'S'? What would an overbite even theoretically have to do with the ability to pronounce [s]?
- naniwaduni 2y agoTry pronouncing [s] with your teeth lined up (or worse, underbite)? It's pretty not the same.
- encipriano 2y agoTheres like more than 5 types of s you can pronounce