from Hacker News

Ancient switch to soft food gave us overbite–the ability to pronounce 'f's,'v'

by NoRagrets on 2/20/25, 5:49 PM with 118 comments

• by reverendsteveii on 2/21/25, 4:15 PM

  Not me trying to pronounce those with an underbite just to be contrarian

• by dpcx on 2/21/25, 3:30 PM

  This is discussed at length in (Breath)[0] which also discusses other things about how it's caused issues with breathing.

  [0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48890486-breath

• by crazygringo on 2/21/25, 4:51 PM

  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?

• by AndrewKemendo on 2/21/25, 3:58 PM

  “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...

• by perthmad on 2/21/25, 4:50 PM

  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...

• by ComputerGuru on 2/21/25, 5:12 PM

  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)?

• by romaaeterna on 2/22/25, 1:46 PM

  The switch from aspirate to fricative pronunciations in Greek was between 2-400AD, and was related to ongoing processes in the language unrelated to jaw change.

  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?

• by hello_computer on 2/21/25, 6:27 PM

  Leaning on the biological and evolutionary conclusions of linguists... New talk-show "science" to replace the old talk-show "science".

• by justinko on 2/21/25, 5:21 PM

  It also gave us sleep apnea.

  Agriculture was without a doubt the worst thing to ever happen to us.

• by turtlemir on 2/21/25, 3:43 PM

  I feel there are so many health issues plaguing our modern population.

  -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

• by thaumasiotes on 2/21/25, 11:42 PM

  'S'? What would an overbite even theoretically have to do with the ability to pronounce [s]?

• by amriksohata on 2/21/25, 5:44 PM

  _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"

• by deadbabe on 2/21/25, 3:35 PM

  What sounds can we only pronounce with underbites?

• by iwontberude on 2/22/25, 6:17 PM

  This is bullshit, a five second test let’s you know.

• by BJones12 on 2/20/25, 6:16 PM

  Just a reminder that we are in the middle of a silent epidemic of small jaws [0] and that if you feed your kids hard food they will grow up to be healthier and more attractive.

  [0]] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32973408/