Ancient switch to soft food gave us overbite–the ability to pronounce 'f's,'v'
105 comments
·February 20, 2025reverendsteveii
tiltowait
I have an underbite and pronounce those sounds just fine, so I’m a little suspicious of the assertion.
ryanmcbride
I was able to!
ggm
For me "vee" was the hardest
dpcx
This is discussed at length in (Breath)[0] which also discusses other things about how it's caused issues with breathing.
sxp
This book is amazing. Two useful bits that really helped me were mastic gum and mouth tape. Both of them made it much easier for me to breath through my nose at night and avoid waking up with a dry mouth in the morning.
There are also some interesting bits on breathwork and the scientific aspects of it. I was able to use those techniques to temporarily lower my heart rate to 45 BPM during meditation.
soperj
> I was able to use those techniques to temporarily lower my heart rate to 45 BPM during meditation.
What's your normal resting heart rate? Mine hovers around 39-40, so getting to 45 isn't really an issue.
martinjacobd
Are you an endurance athlete?
I was surprised at how quickly my rhr came down after I started cycling more even though I've never been very active in my life.
It also (I think!) helped with my sleep apnea/general sleep problems, and I've always assumed a good bit of that was literally just being better at breathing.
sxp
An average of 60-70 according to watch.
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begueradj
That'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
Does he give some examples of non soft foods?
hombre_fatal
Guy 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.
gsich
Don't know. Carrots maybe?
FuriouslyAdrift
Pumpernickel bread... tough slices of meat?
42772827
Great book. I’m still working on breathing because of it. Here’s a bookshop.org ebook link for it: https://bookshop.org/p/books/breath-the-new-science-of-a-los...
crazygringo
How 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
This 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.
crazygringo
> and conversely, if you raised your child with a hunter-gatherer diet, they would develop an underbite.
I.e. an edge-to-edge bite?
I understand this is the idea behind "mewing", but I thought there was no actual evidence for that, and that it is not the consensus scientific position? Or has something changed?
robbiep
Not exactly your question, but it is well established that chewing/gnawing as a (young) child is directly proportional to jaw length (I guess you could say prognanthicism to some degree) - but specifically the amount of space available in the mouth for teeth. People who chewed/gnawed on ie a rug or something as a child are less likely to have crowding in their mouth and more likely to have eruption of wisdom teeth without an issue. This makes sense - using your muscles in these ways especially during significant developmental stages changes the release of trophic factors which in turn change development.
Really it’s no different from how someone who uses their body differs from someone who is sedentary all the time but in this case the timing of the ‘intervention’ causes big downstream changes
quanto
Indeed. In fact, as a tongue-in-cheek example in real life, you can see the subtle facial structure difference between Asians (say, southern Han Chinese in Fujian) versus 3rd generation Chinese Americans from the same region (with no mixed ancestry). Diet, language, facial muscle behaviors (e.g. frowning), and surrounding beauty standards may have contributed to differences in the mandibular (and elsewhere) structure. Western diet tends to be a bit more chewy and meaty than, say, softer carb-heavy southern Chinese diet.
metalman
Hunter 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.
jerf
It's the opposite of evolution. The environment changed, the genetics didn't. It's not that the genes changed, it's precisely that they didn't.
Zenbit_UX
It’s not evolution, just look at your mouth breather friend as an example. Recessed jaw, poor intake of breath due to a constricted airway, sleep apnea, gerd, bruxism, cavities… it’s all related.
dr-detroit
[dead]
perthmad
It 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...
Needless to say I've always found this hypothesis doesn't really hold water...
elnatro
All speakers of old Spanish had bad teeth? And from all zones? Doesn’t make sense.
ysavir
I 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.
thaumasiotes
Well, considering that /f/ and /h/ fail to be distinct in at least one major variety of Chinese, and in Japanese...
why would we need an explanation for a historical change from /f/ to /h/?
ComputerGuru
Can 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)?
justinko
It also gave us sleep apnea.
Agriculture was without a doubt the worst thing to ever happen to us.
Zenbit_UX
Na, the worst thing to ever happen to us was hyperbole.
tayo42
Don't you still have the freedom to eat like a pre agriculture human now?
Just buy some meat and nuts? What exactly is different?
theultdev
Nothing stopping you from reversing the trend and start hunting if your sleep apnea is so bad.
marssaxman
Nothing 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
There 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.
hello_computer
Leaning on the biological and evolutionary conclusions of linguists... New talk-show "science" to replace the old talk-show "science".
thaumasiotes
'S'? What would an overbite even theoretically have to do with the ability to pronounce [s]?
naniwaduni
Try pronouncing [s] with your teeth lined up (or worse, underbite)? It's pretty not the same.
AndrewKemendo
“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-p...
hombre_fatal
Someone'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.
Daishiman
> 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.
dennis_jeeves2
>Our extremely energy-intensive brains can only be fed because we pre-digest our meals through fire.
The exception being animal derived foods. ( eggs, meat, fish, milk etc.). These food can be raw, and will still reliably fuel the brain.
adrian_b
This is correct.
Heat treatment of animal food has benefits, like killing parasites, softening meat enough for weak human teeth, extracting proteins from bones through boiling, or denaturating harmful proteins, like those from egg whites, but it has little importance for digestibility.
In general, heat treatment is not useful for fatty substances and it is seldom useful for proteins. Heat treatment is important mainly for making starch digestible and for releasing various components of vegetable cells that would otherwise require much more chewing or much more fermentation time in the guts than possible for humans.
Daishiman
And yet we've been using fire to cook food for much longer than most of the recognizable homo sapiens features emerged, so no, we weren't eating raw food.
deadbabe
What sounds can we only pronounce with underbites?
tboyd47
There'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/).
naniwaduni
Interestingly, I find it perceptually closer to /θ/... would want to try recording though.
peterfirefly
I 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.
pineaux
I really dont buy the premisse of this piece. I can easily make the same sounds with an underbite
amriksohata
_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"
nkrisc
Various 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
In 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.
adrian_b
Once the inedible husks are removed from wheat grains, they can be eaten with minimal work, actually less work than when grounding them into floor.
Wheat grains (without husks) or any other cereal grains, can be eaten easily just by adding an appropriate amount of water (e.g. 4 times their weight) and boiling them, exactly like one would make cooked rice from rice grains.
Making flour and bread (initially unleavened, then leavened) has required considerably more work, not less work, but it has become the preferred way to eat wheat because it was considered much more tasty than boiled grains or porridge.
The varieties of wheat that were available before domestication had seeds from which it was difficult to remove the hulls, so milling them into coarse floor and boiling that into a porridge was actually easier than removing just the husks and boiling the whole grains.
Even in this case, when some kind of flour has been used since the beginning, instead of whole grains, the evolution from coarse floor and porridge to fine floor and bread has increased the amount of work required for eating wheat.
thaumasiotes
> Even in this case, when some kind of flour has been used since the beginning, instead of whole grains, the evolution from coarse floor and porridge to fine floor and bread has increased the amount of work required for eating wheat.
There are two concepts of "work required to eat [something]".
You might be talking about the amount of labor that goes into preparing the food.
Or you might be talking about the amount of labor that goes into digesting the food.
Bread from fine flour may be harder to make, but it's much easier to eat.
ivanbakel
Humans 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.
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user9999999999
[flagged]
Not me trying to pronounce those with an underbite just to be contrarian