By Anvi Atreja
Have you ever wondered what our ancestors ate? Today, you might eat sweets and veggies, but what about long ago? You might know that we humans evolved a lot from when we were first made or born. In the past all we had were telegraphs and land-line phones. Now we have cool technology like computers and smart-phones. Like technology, the food we eat has also changed.
When scientists want to know what our ancestors ate, they can look at a few things. They can examine fossilized animal bones with the marks of the tools early humans used to kill and cut them, fossilized poop and teeth. The first two can tell us a lot, but they are rare. Thankfully, we have a lot of teeth to fill in the gaps.
“They preserve really well,” explains Debbie Guatelli Steinberg, a dental anthropologist at Ohio State University. An anthropologist is someone who tries to learn what humans in the past did and how they were different from us. Some examples of older humans are early hominids, and primates like chimpanzees. “It’s kind of convenient because teeth hold so much information.”
You can learn what early teeth are adapted to eat just by the structure or the amount of enamel covering over them. First you look at the molars. A thick enamel on a molar is good for crushing foods. It may suggest that an animal used its teeth to grind seeds or crush the marrow of bones. Thin enamel, on the other hand, makes the molar very delicate yet sharp, making it perfect for slicing and tearing foods like fruits and leaves.
Peter Ungar, is an anthropologist at the University of Arkansas, he says these are just clues to the things animals could have eaten, not the things that they ate daily.
“If you eat fruits almost every day of the year and you move or run out, sometimes you’ll need to eat nuts. To survive, you need teeth that can break nuts.” he explains. So, teeth are usually adapted for the toughest component of an animal’s diet, not exactly what it eats on a daily basis.
To see what an animal was actually eating, Ungar studies a dental microwear. This magnifies the marks left behind by food on teeth. For example, when we chew on a celery stick the hard particles, bits of silica from the plants’ cells or sand and grit from the environment, are pressed into our teeth. When we chomp down on something hard, like a nut, the crushing force leaves microscopic grooves behind. When we tear through tough grasses by moving our teeth side-to-side, the teeth get tiny, microscopic scratches. This type of diet may not seem appetizing to us today, but it probably was to our ancestors.