Two thoughts:
1. They really are no sugar in aboriginal societies? No fruit or carbs?
2. I know a handful of people who eat Western diets who have zero tooth decay.
Doesn’t seem like a great way to tell the age of a skull.
1. They really are no sugar in aboriginal societies? No fruit or carbs?
2. I know a handful of people who eat Western diets who have zero tooth decay.
Doesn’t seem like a great way to tell the age of a skull.
The confidence of people far away at a different time without any relevant knowledge to dismiss an experienced local on the ground based on flawed high-level logic never ceases to surprise.
A lot of the people here are knowledgeable—in specific domains. I think people forget that being an expert in one thing doesn't make you qualified to judge, understand, or discuss another domain in depth.
Case in point, the recent "tech that reduces sound by 94%" post that got upvoted here.
You can cite science and demographic facts while leaving out your own overt normative opinions, yet you will still get downvoted from both 'sides' who think they are being slighted if you don't give a clear opinion. Unfortunately this is the way scientific method-driven experts talk (and generally anyone who's into political science rather than political opinion) - but in this domain it really sets non-experts off for some reason.
The thing is, most people are taught at a young age that their political opinion matters a lot, which probably has something to do with generalized experts walking into this domain thinking they're already experts and getting quickly frustrated when they realize they're not, lashing out at the source of that frustration via downvotes.
Back in the day the responses to these kinds of topics used to be via comments, now it's almost always via drive-by downvotes. I used to bemoan the inane buzzword replies back in the forum days because they were typically boring and predictable, but they were still infinitely better than the downvote without comment that is the norm for this site (and even more common on reddit).
I have no doubt that you can tell the age of a skull with a close inspection of the teeth. This story was an anthropologist looking at remains from several feet away and claiming that it’s aboriginal from the lack of dental decay.
I proposed a few exceptions to that rule. Certainly not a quip about the expertise of the anthropologist, but rather the accuracy of the story.
Ask any doctor or midwife who can look at an ultrasound image and tell you the sex of the baby while you are still staring at a smudgy grey moving image. Ask any accident investigator who can estimate the speed and trajectory of the vehicles while you are still looking for the skid marks.
I personally have spent over 25 years interacting on public message boards, and I am a domain expert enough that I can pick an armchair expert who has lots of perceived theoretical knowledge, but little or no real world knowledge, but still feels the need to espouse their opinion in order to get their dopamine hit of the day - all just from a quick glance at their post.
However, I have listened to a talk by a lady (she consults on murdered cadavers) who can tell which season a body died in by analyzing the teeth! Apparently there is a lot there.
Also, people didn’t live as long as they do now. So less chance to have your teeth rotten. Furthermore: the skeletons might have been of people in their twenties with arguably better teeth than old people.
Lots of questions that this anecdote doesn’t answer and you dismiss critique as pretentious.
Sugar is being added to most foods nowadays. The timeline of cheap refined sugar is the timeline of sugar addiction and tooth decay.
Scientists examined the remains of 52 adults who had lived between roughly 12,000 and 13,000 B.C. and were buried in the cave. An astonishing 49 of them, or 94%, had cavities, which affected more than half of the surviving teeth.
Plus another link in this thread claims ancient fruits have different sugars that don’t cause decay.
Any ties with the sugar lobbby famous for lobbying the US government into blackmailing the WHO in increasing the amounts “healthy” sugar in their dietary guidelines?
Even with oranges which have very high sugar content, you cannot easily eat four oranges but you can drink their orange juice along with most of the sugar and none of the fiber.
The sugar lobby’s talking points steer the conversation toward equalizing refined and non refined sugars, and calories from refined sugars vs calories from non refined sugars.
I found this in depth lecture really enlightening
Going to take a guess and say that a brief glance at the teeth is probably not the _only_ age determination method they applied before determining their course of action.
Here's a somewhat fascinating article looking at both sides of this debate: https://deniseminger.com/2011/05/31/wild-and-ancient-fruit/
The conclusion to me seems to be that unless you're in the tropics, you almost certainly be eating less fruit, and the fruit you'll eat will be much more varied and seasonal. A lot of the wild fruit you eat may have specific defenses (tannins, alkaloids, etc.) that discourage you from eating too much (the fruit's job is to make you spread and excrete its seeds, after all).