156 points | by NoRagrets1 天前
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?
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.
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?
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
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.
What's your normal resting heart rate? Mine hovers around 39-40, so getting to 45 isn't really an issue.
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.
In an interview with Joe Rogan, James Nestor suggested to encourage our kids to eat non soft food daily.
Ironic you can only make soft foods with those
Obviously there are downsides to letting small children chew on bones.
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...
So yeah, the hypothesis is most likely bunk.
So I doubt any previous change in the language was a coincidence or fashion: the population that spoke old Spanish was so big and diverse that it’s nearly impossible for them to suffer the same events.
why would we need an explanation for a historical change from /f/ to /h/?
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?
-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
I know this because I suffer from it
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.
There’s an interesting middle ground that’s being studied: “peripheral defocus” lenses. The idea, as I understand it, is to give sharp central vision, but to blur the peripheral vision in a way that encourages the eyes to grow appropriately.
My dad grew up on a farm, and rarely spent much time inside, still needed strong glasses all his life to see.
Either computers are quick to ruin eyesight or it was genetic.
Farsighted though is awfully convenient for staring at screens with a good prescription - at worst, my vision improves over time. :)
Like, do you really think your tongue position is affecting your facial and jaw structure? I'm guessing you believe in "mewing", and every before/after image I have seen has just been a joke.
Agriculture was without a doubt the worst thing to ever happen to us.
Just buy some meat and nuts? What exactly is different?
Of course there's more wild land than cultured land still today, but the best and most fertile land has been taken for agriculture.
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...
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.
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.
The exception being animal derived foods. ( eggs, meat, fish, milk etc.). These food can be raw, and will still reliably fuel the brain.
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.
What? When were foods processed thousands of years ago? Also Carrots and fruit are not "soft"
"Processed" doesn't just mean Doritos.
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.
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.
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.
Unlike porridge, bread still requires vigorous chewing, especially in the case of the kinds of bread available to the ancients, which were not as fluffy as many modern kinds of bread.
Ancient Rome is an example of a society that has transitioned from eating porridge to eating bread during historical times. While during the late Roman Republic and during the Empire the staple food of the Romans was bread made of (triploid) wheat flour, the staple food of the earlier Romans was "pult" made of "far", i.e. porridge made of emmer wheat.
This transition was also a transition from porridge made by each family at home to flour and bread made by professionals, because that required much more work.
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.
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.
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.
I am definitely interested in this.
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.
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
Even things like crackers may count, but generally hard foods include raw vegetables and certain fruit like apples and nuts.
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.
Please no more blog posts or journal articles.
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.