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“how we lived our entire history” is generally “as hunter-gatherers, who died when something went slightly wrong”.
Slightly deeper than normal scratch? Massive infection and death
get a cavity? hope you enjoy slow, painful decay
Luckily they didn’t, until they invented grain farming and storage and bread every day
Hunter gatherers before 10k years ago (before Egypt learnt to farm) had great teeth
This isn’t universally true. There were less incidences of general tooth decay due to different microflora than we have now, but people absolutely still got dental issues that would result in systemic infections and death.
Sure. Tropical people have always had fruit, some had sugar cane. People fought and their teeth were damaged
But dental cavities and abscesses are caused by sugar in your mouth, and bread has always been good at getting stuck between people’s teeth, while their saliva converts the starches to sugars
Archaeologists determine whether a skeleton came from a hunter gatherer or a settled farmer by their teeth
Microflora in your mouth - perhaps they did have different, there’s no evidence, but if so I would guess that one’s mouth microflora changes depending on what one eats
Note that the process that damages teeth is fermentation - where sugar is fermented, liberating energy, carbonic acid. That doesn’t happen in the absence of sugar that persists in your mouth
i mean sure they didn’t have modern medicine, but they were generally in way better health than we are now and still had basic plant medicine.
washing off wounds and wrapping them in medicinal leaves does a lot, and there is archaeological evidence of individuals who were in extremely bad health and yet through care from their tribe they managed to survive for years in such a state.
This idea that hunter-gatherers lived lives of misery and were too dumb to try to prevent bad things is unfortunately very widespread, when the reality is that hunter-gatherers had it about as good as you can expect from living without modern technology.
If we’re going to be saddled with 19th century British customs they could at least have left in all the drugs.
We do have the gin.
it is our god given RIGHT to buy morphene over the counter!
“These are our ANCIENT TRADITIONS”
Yeah sure they are buddy, people in this town were totally exploding fireworks 300 years ago at 4AM. Is being a drunkard your family tradition too?
I mean the day drinking is probably a lot older as a custom than the little bombs, but
China is probably the one place that can lay claim to that particular tradition being ancient. They go hard for spring festival.
