mine too. the procedure was terrifying though. the dentist was working with an actual chisel (don’t know the correct dentist term) in my mouth to break the teeth up before extracting the pieces. at one point he exerted so much pressure on the chisel that I could hardly keep my head straight against it, and I thought “if he slips now, I’ve had a left cheek”.
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The article you linked is specifically talking about farmers, not hunter-gatherers, and thus post-dates the invention of agriculture. (Oh, and also it’s Huffington Post, which is never a valid cite for anything, really; just like Drudge Report.)
Keep in mind that selective breeding of cereal crops is known to have been happening more than 3000 years before the birth of the White Christ, but that archeologists working with the period of the notional Indo-Iranian expansion westwards can segregate human remains into fast-moving horse-eating, horse-riding nomadic cultures and slow-moving, fishing and farming cultures by whether or not the teeth show evidence of dental caries.
If you want to read about pre-chariot, pre-agricultural people of the central European steppe that were both riding and eating horses, there’s lots of Russian archeology papers online, and personally I enjoyed David Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (although that’s a tough read if you don’t already enjoy research papers). If you want to read about pre-agricultural diets in northwestern Europe you’ll want Scandinavian sources.
I just realized that mine finally came in. Out? Whatever; they’re not within my gums anymore. A bit crooked. I used to get bad headaches during my early 20s, which I figured was due to my wisdom teeth, allergies/sinuses, caffeine dependency, or more than one of the above. Although it subsided I can remember still having gum pain and buying some Orajel when I was around 27. (That was around the time I went to the dentist like 6 times in a few months, but not for wisdom teeth.) I guess eventually they just stopped bothering me.
And here I’ll readily admit to not visiting the dentist as often as I should. I don’t even go once a year, much less twice.
I was definitely out for mine. It wasn’t even a question, it was just “we’re putting you under.”
When I had toe surgery a year or so later (really bad ingrown toenail), they just used a local, but gave me a National Geographic magazine to read. I told them I was fine and the doc said “uh, you don’t want to see what we’re doing down there, I promise you.” I took his word for it and read the same paragraph about beekeeping about a hundred times.
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yeah, the article uses the bones from early farmers, and uses that as an upper amount.
i used that article rather than papers, just because the article was quick to find and easy to read. not as many papers on the subject seemed to be readily available.
sounds cool! i studied archaeology in undergraduate, but that area and time period is one i don’t know much about. i might just add that to my list of things to read.
the core of my point was just to refute the sentence you wrote: “Most pre-agricultural humans apparently ate predominantly meat”
meat was not as important as many early anthropologists felt. ( in extant hunter-gatherer groups, it is often a prestige food: beloved because rare. no pun intended. 
) these days it is believed – so far as i know – the bulk of calories for most pre-agrarian societies was gathered, not hunted.
I believe this is the mainstream view, at this time. I do a fair amount of reading in archeology and history, and have done so for decades. Dissenters certainly do exist! But you can’t refute the sentence using data from post-agricultural human cultures (and, as I already mentioned, Huffington Post is the very opposite of a credible source for scientific citations; it is a political site.)
In my reading, such situations are so vanishingly rare as to warrant special notice. Note, I don’t read stuff written by proponents of vegetarian or paleo diets, I read archaeology and history. However, as I’ve said, there are diverging views - you might enjoy this paper, which is very even-handed and frankly admits the limits of what we can know at this time, but also links to many other papers that present evidence from various more extreme points of view. From one of those you could find support for your thesis, although (at this time) it’s easier to find support for mine.
yeah, that survey also came up when i was searching. again, i was trying to share something more easily… digestible. at any rate in the summation, the authors conclude:
We can infer… there is evidence for an increase in meat consumption in the Homo line through time. However… the same data has been interpreted as … increasing use of energy-rich plant foods… Perhaps the best interpretation of the morphological data is that hominids, and especially modern humans, have been very successful as highly adaptable omnivores, that probably had a significant input of animal products into their diets.
which again, would refute “predominately”. obviously, meat and hunting played a role in human development, however: so did the stable group socialization required for gathering.
regarding wisdom teeth, it’s always interesting to me how when certain traits exhibit selection pressure – humans, for instance, gaining increased brain size – there are gene-expression and, for lack of a better word, engineering tradeoffs. our brains got bigger, our jaws shrank, and our wisdom teeth send us to the dentist.
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Fucking wisdom teeth. I have had two sets that needed to get removed for reasons (and yes, it was necessary both times). One time it was as a teenager, the other as an adult. Both times I opted for local anesthetic.
I do completely agree that it’s a largely unnecessary procedure if it’s not causing problems.
I’m a mutant with only one, and it doesn’t show up on x-rays anymore. Guess I still have it…somewhere.
@nungesser: You’re my opposite mutant!
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I don’t normally read scientific papers as easily digestible as that one, to be quite blunt. I usually read stuff more like this and this and this.
But if you research the academic references in that paper, you’ll find I’ve basically handed you a half dozen dissident views that support your argument. Unfortunately, though, there isn’t sufficient evidence to conclusively prove anything at this point (which is what the partial quote you posted says. Note the use of the words infer, perhaps, and probably). Enough doubt still remains, if you want to be truly rigorous, to allow speculation and opinion.
All that being said, currently the mainstream view is still the most strongly supported, since it has bone chemistry data in its favor as well as a tremendous amount of other physical evidence, while the dissident view relies heavily on the incompleteness of the archaeological record - people claiming that pre-agricultural humans ate predominantly vegetable matter say that the evidence for this (unlike stone butchering tools and bones with butcher marks) has all rotted away. It’s an argument based on absence of evidence, because such evidence is known to be relatively perishable, when compared to the abundant evidence of meat-eating.
Just as the predominant opinion among climate scientists is that anthropomorphic climate change is real, the predominant opinion among archaeologists is that most pre-agricultural humans mostly ate lots and lots of animal products, including meat, blood, milk, fish, and insects. A diet which is well known to reduce or eliminate the incidence of dental caries.
Nobody can stop you from having your own opinion, but you are going to have to accept that it’s very much a minority opinion, and certainly the mainstream viewpoint has not even come close to being “refuted”. If it ever is refuted, it will make a very big splash in my world; I and my friends will be talking about it for literally years. We’re still talking about the whole chariot thing!
i can agree with you that the percentage of meat in early human diet is not settled science. i only take issue with predominate.
the sociological reasons behind the original viewpoint of meat-centric diets – what was back in the 60s and 70s mainstream – can be traced to the western, male-dominated, anthropological community. as more viewpoints were added, research to challenge that view arose.
in fact, i think it’s really cool to see the science play out. people digging in to try to build hypotheses and prove them, rather than just say: “man the hunter” with purely ungrounded speculation.
i won’t disagree either that there remains a lot of momentum behind those older views. the thing is – they started based not on science, but because of sexism. while you can get to the right place with the wrong directions, the evidence poking holes in those original concepts isn’t just going to go away.
as to the article you initially gave, the intent of such surveys is to try determine – not what is opinion – but what is the current state of the field. and the take away is not the one you laid out.
animal products, including meat, blood, milk, fish, and insects.
i don’t disagree that with husbandry, cultures began utilize animals more completely. that list you gave is a good one. i’d add shellfish to it (pre-and-post husbandry). i can even allow that perhaps those diets are fairly cavity free.
in the modern era, i do know that animal-centric diets are – since you brought it up – contributing rather significantly to climate change. for our near-term and long-term health, i’d rather we look back towards our leaner roots than our bloody meats. since we’re omnivores, it’s a choice we have.
Phew! 
Please don’t do this, it’s really not safe. Concentration, coordination, memory and judgement are all impaired post anaesthesia for around 24 hours. A responsible adult to drive you home and watch over you are essential. And if you do drive and have an accident on the way home, your insurance cover will vanish as soon as the insurance company finds out …
I had to have all 4 mine out as a teenager. They were all impacted and cause chronic throat infections. They had to break two to get them out and the other two came out whole and my Mom made me earrings of them. 
However I am now of the opinion that I’m one of “those” red heads that react differently to pain killers and opiates. Because I was out for nearly 3 days with the anesthetic which makes me think my body is really good at producing morphine. Red heads have more fun.
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Wait, what? You’re grinding so many political axes you’re going to wear the stone to a nub. I’m afraid Marija Gambutas kicked the “western, male-dominated, anthropological community” to pieces in the late 50s, and there’s little left of it for us to fuss over.
We’ll just have to agree to disagree; I am going to ignore the politics and continue to enjoy the science.
Oh god yes. I’m not really a redhead, but my dad was, and weird medication reactions run strongly in my family. The last time I was under anesthesia, I apparently had a 15-minute conversation with my surgeon in recovery. I was coherent, articulate, and asked intelligent post-operative questions … according to her, anyway. I have no memory of it. Nor of the hour before they put me under.
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I’m reported to have done this as well. It’s hearsay on my part of course.
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Same here, and I’ve seen the video of it. I was coming up out of being sedated with propofol and fentanyl. I was awake, coherent, having a conversation… but it wasn’t me in the video. It was chilling and kind of scary. And I have no memory of it, even under hypnosis.
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Propofol was also my drug, once for an endoscopy, and the other during my first colonoscopy.
The trend says I’m handling it better, but my tolerances are still crazy. I wake up from it in about 2m. They were surprised last time.
Same reaction to propofol. I don’t remember it at all, which means I remember exactly none of the post-operative interview with the physician. I’m still peeved about this - if a surgeon uses a known amnesiac drug on you (and they do love those amnesiac anesthetics, the inside joke is that you won’t remember the part when the surgeon says “oops, shouldn’t have chopped that off”) then they shouldn’t be discussing your treatment and post-treatment care with you while you’re still likely to be experiencing the effects of the drug.
Conversely, I cannot form a sentence for about 24 hours after having those drugs. Individual incoherent words, yes, but nothing understandable. And then there’s the nausea. Those drugs make my brain feel like it’s been on an out-of-control merry-go-round.
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