Stone Age chewing gum holds clues to the life of a girl who lived 5700 years ago

edition.cnn.com

54 points·dsr12··12 comments

I guess it was naive of me, but I was really hoping for an image of the girl. Even a reasonable guess can be pretty interesting sometimes.

When you see that image of what King Tutankhamun most likely looked like, it's kind of jarring.

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/191217110819-02-ancen...

There's a lot of images on the article, but most of them seem to be links to other articles. Was that slideshow specific to this article? The first image seemed to be a skull that was completely unrelated.

These reconstructions are mostly nonsense, especially in these cases where they don't even have a complete skull to work from.

Interesting bit of knowledge I gained from the article is that it's believed we only gained the ability to digest milk recently. Prior to that all humans were lactose intolerant.

I believe they meant all humans older than infants - adult onset lactose intolerance, otherwise it implies human lactation is a recent evolutionary trait that was reacquired or mothers made milk but their babies could not drink it.

The term lactose intolerant is commonly used as shorthand for adult onset.

One theory for the incredibly rapid spread of lactose tolerance is that during times of famine, lactose intolerant people in Northern Europe would drink fresh milk (out of desperation) and the resultant diarrhea would weaken them even more.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/12/27/168144785/an...

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